Wherever you find yourself on this day, I have a wish or two for you…
Wish Gathering
…I wish for you to experience beauty and joy.
…I wish for you to explore your curiosity and creativity.
…I wish for you to be enveloped by people who love and cherish you.
…I wish for you to find peace in your heart, your home, your life.
My most heartfelt, best wishes go out to you this holiday season.
The countdown has begun! Less than one month until my iPhone Photography Book, Art with an iPhone, begins shipping from Amazon. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see my book in print! There is still time to preorder and get it right away when it ships on January 12.
If you’ve been following my #30edits challenge, you’ve been seeing some of the amazing things you can do with an iPhone camera and apps. This is exactly the kind of art my book teaches you to create. Cool, huh? Here are numbers 9 through 18 of my #30edits:
Interested? I hope so! I’d love to share more about this great art form with you.
As my #30edits project continues, I’m getting more experimental! Last week I was inspired to create a tree mandala as a coloring page, since adult coloring books are all the rage these days.
I created the mandala first and then colored it with an app called Art Set, which allows you to color and paint digitally on a photograph. I am making the blank version available for you to download here. You can either print and color on paper, or import into a coloring app like Art Set or Procreate to color digitally. Either way it’s good fun!
It is actually very easy to create these mandalas in just a few steps from a photograph. If you want to try it, pick a simple, graphic image — something with good lines and edges. Then, follow these steps:
1. Create a high contrast black and white image of your photograph. Snapseed is a great place to start, using the Black and White filter. You might need to run it through the Black and White filter more than once to get the strong black/white contrast you need for this process.
2. Create a line drawing from your photograph, using an app like Sketch Me or a drawing effect in iColorama. You want to pick up the edges of your shape, keeping the center open so there is space to color. Experiment with settings until you get something like this:
3. Use a kaleidoscope effect to reflect the image in slices around a central point, which creates the mandala. I used the Kaleidoscope effect in XnView Photo FX to create this one:
Easier than you thought, huh? Have fun coloring!
I’m so excited to bring you a brand new workshop in January!
Have you been wanting to improve your photography? To create more interesting images from the world around you? It all starts with composition.
I believe improving your composition skills is the single most important thing you can do to improve your photography, with any type of camera. But, composition can be really hard to get your mind wrapped around. That’s why I’ve developed simple strategy to help you create compelling compositions in your photographs without worrying about a list of do’s and don’t’s.
And the Corvallis Library is sponsoring a workshop, free to the public, where you can learn this strategy!
Out of the Box: A New Composition Strategy for Creating Compelling Photographs
Corvallis Public Library, Main Meeting Room, Corvallis, Oregon
January 16, 2016, 1pm to 4pm
Workshop details here
Workshop is FREE! Register by calling 541-766-6793 or email askalibrarian@corvallisoregon.gov
Register early, space is limited.
And if you aren’t close enough to attend? I’ve got resources to learn about composition available for you too:
I’m 11 pieces in to my #30edits challenge and still going strong. I’m surprised at how much fun I’m having! Who would have thought editing one picture multiple times could bring such joy?
I think it’s because I’m being challenged creatively. Here is how the #30edits challenge is showing up positively for me so far:
To do some of the things I want to do, I have to solve problems and learn something new. I get great satisfaction in both figuring out how to make something work, and in discovering new techniques when something doesn’t come out the way I expect. There is no downside.
If I reach a dead end, I am forced to move in another direction rather than abandoning my efforts and losing steam. Stopping is not an option, because I need to create something new with this image. Some of my dead ends one day have become starting places the next day, as I see new possibilities given time and experimentation. That is a powerful lesson – there are no dead ends, only altered destinations.
Each individual edit doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It’s about finding a new way to use the elements I have available. It is pushing me beyond my usual places, letting me experiment with new apps and new ways to use old apps. Sure, some edits result in better images than others. Who cares! I have 30 to do, I can’t get wrapped up in any single result.
And it’s a fantastic reminder of why I love trees. They are such an interesting graphic element. Look at all of the amazing things I can do with one tree! Imagine what I could do with more. (Well, you don’t have to imagine, because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years. But it is a reminder to me to get out and photograph some new tree images to work with, once this challenge is done!)
So, do you have a challenge you are working on? Pick something, anything, like I did. It doesn’t have to be #30edits, but find something that gets you excited to keep moving creatively. Something that gets you out of your comfort zone and trying something new.
Who knows what will result? We’ll see what happens for me. 19 more to go!
Happy Tuesday! It’s time to finish off the tutorial I started last week.
But first, a quick check in on the #30edits project. There have been some challenging moments, but I’ve pushed past them and it’s going well. Here is #9, called “Merge/Emerge”. You can see what I’ve been creating on Instagram, and join in any time!
Now, it’s time to get into part two of the tutorial, the “cutting” part. I need to get that cactus in there! To see how I merged the mountains and clouds into one image, go to part one here.
The “cutting” process is done in the same app I used for cleaning, Handy Photo, using the “Move Me” function. I start with a terrible photo, taken from the window of the car. I was taking random photos out the window as we sped by the desert at 65mph, hoping to get at least one good, recognizable cactus silhouette to use.
Yay! Out of about thirty images, I had one that worked. The first step in cutting my cactus out is to convert the image to black and white. Since I want the cactus to be a silhouette against the sunset, it won’t do to have it green. I use Snapseed’s Black and White conversion, increasing the contrast to get the cactus as black as possible.
Now I am ready to cut! I load the black and white version into Handy Photo, and select the Move Me menu.
In the Move Me menu, there are four options: Lasso, Brush, Eraser, and Import. The Lasso, Brush and Eraser work the same as in Retouch from Part 1. Import allows you to import a previous “cut” item and place it in this picture. After I cut out my cactus and save it, I could import it here.
But first, I need to cut out the cactus. If the item I want has a strong contrast with the background, as I do here, using the Lasso is the easiest way to cut it out. I select Lasso, then draw around the item I want to cut. If my start and end lines don’t match up, that’s ok – Handy Photo will draw a line between them to close the shape. When my shape is filled in, I choose the “Fit to Edge” function (3) in the pop up menu that appears on the right of the screen.
“Fit to Edge” is an awesome feature, which gets software to do my detailed work for me! It finds the edge of whatever you highlighted, assuming you have good contrast between the object and background.
You can see it’s not perfect, so now I use the Brush and Eraser to finish up the fine details. One thing I want to make sure to erase are the highlights on the left edge of the cactus. Those will look weird since I want the cactus shape to be a silhouette. I select Eraser, use it on the photo (a zoom window will pop up, to show me where I am working), and do the detail work. If I need to, I can switch back to Brush and fill spaces in.
Once the shape is highlighted, there are two options for moving it. “Cut” takes the shape and does a content-aware fill on the background, so I can move the shape within the same image. “Copy” duplicates the shape so I can add more of the shape to the same image. For my purposes, either will work. I usually use the “Cut” option so I can see the detail better as I move the shape.
Once I’ve cut the shape, I can edit and move it. The editing options are shown on the bottom left menu: Transform (rotate/flip), Opacity, Saturation and Edge Smoothness. Edge smoothness is nice, because it can help you soften jagged edges from imperfect brushwork so the shape blends into a background better. It can also look weird if it’s done in the extreme, so experimentation is required.
Once I’ve edited the shape, I use the right menu bar to move it. The options are to move to a New Layer, move to a New Picture, or Export as PNG. For more control of the blending process, use Export as PNG and blend in Image Blender. Expore as PNG will save a file that has the shape only (no background pixels) to your Camera Roll. Here’s the shape PNG alone:
While I move on to the next part of the process, I keep Handy Photo opened in the background. If I discover that something is wonky with the shape I cut, I can return to Handy Photo, use “Undo”, and make adjustments to the shape without starting the process from the beginning. As long as you have not exited the Move Me menu, Handy Photo retains the history. That is nice!
Now I’m ready to add the cactus to the sunset image! In Image Blender, I load the composite sunset image as the bottom layer, the PNG as the top layer and then I blend using either Darken or Multiply at 100% to ensure the tones of the cut image match the tones of the background. Because it is a PNG which has a transparent background, the only pixels that are blending are the cactus. Nice!
Save this blended image, and I’m done. I now have my sunset silhouette for further processing. To finish the processing, I imported the composite image into the Circular app and experimented from there. I had to come back to my elements multiple times, adjusting the composition so the cactus was in the right place.
As a reminder, here’s the final image:
A Thousand Desert Sunsets
With Cleaning and Cutting, you have great tools to combine elements from multiple photos to create composite images. If something in your composition is not quite right, consider what you can do with Cleaning or Cutting to improve it. It’s a fantastic tool to make your photography-based art that much better.
If you are uncomfortable with this idea, remember this: You are creating art. Photographs are raw material, and you can do whatever you want with the images you create.
Have fun!
