iColorama

August 20, 2016 by Kat

Creating an Interesting Profile Photo, Part 2

Love them or hate them, profile photos are now a way of life. You can hardly navigate the online world without having an avatar that shows who you are. And why would you want to? Sharing a photo of yourself as you participate online inspires trust and establishes you as a real human, ready to be yourself in both the real and online worlds. If you do it right, a profile photo can be an extension of your personality. A good one can be your own personal logo, making you instantly recognizable online.

So let’s make a good one, shall we? This week I’m sharing Part 2 of the Creating an Interesting Profile Photo tutorial, which steps you through the process I used to create my and my son’s new profile photos, shown below.

We pick up where Part 1 left off, so visit that part first to see where these images started.

Step 4 – Alter the Color

I wanted to add some geometric effects to the profile photos, and adding effects to a full color photo can be hit or miss. It is very easy to create visual mess with lots of color and lots of shapes, so going to a simpler color palette allows you more complexity in effects later.

I started the color alterations on Brandon’s by going black and white in an earlier step. In iColorama, I exaggerated the black and white, giving it a more graphic feel by increasing contrast and grain using an effect found under the Style > Hatch menu.

From there I altered the color using a preset under the Tone > Tint menu. Explore the blending mode options when using this menu. Screen blending mode worked best to tone the black and white in this case.

For my profile photo, I started with the color version and went straight into the Tone > Dutone menu. In this case, I didn’t change the Blend Mode but I did change the Opacity setting to 80%, letting a little bit of the original color come through so it was not a flat blue. In many iColorama menus there are a range of adjustment options like Blend Modes and Opacity. Experiment with these to get a custom look for your image.

Step 5 – Add effects

Now I’m ready for the fun part, adding effects! iColorama has a great range of geometric effects, which is what I wanted here to represent the “techie-ness” of my son, and myself too. That geeky engineering background needs to come through! You will want to choose your own effects based on your personality. Do you want to go painterly and soft? Are natural fibers and textures more your thing? Think about what you like to wear, the art you choose, the colors you gravitate to. It’s not only the photo, but the application of color and effects that make the profile photo represent you.

So… Geometric effects for me and Brandon. This is where I’m going to go into more detail, and share a great feature in iColorama: The Swatch.

All of the effects I used in these images are found under the Preset menu, either Grids or Shift. In Grids, you have a number of preset grid options you can overlay onto your image. When you first try out the Grid presets, you may notice the grid is a distracting black and it may cover important parts of the photo… Like your eyes and face. But there is a great range of adjustability in these Grids. Start with with Size and Feature sliders at the bottom to see what they do. In this case. The grid flips around to be where I want it – away from Brandon’s face – just by adjusting these sliders.

Once you have a grid where you want it, it’s time to change the color. Tap the Grid Color icon at the bottom of the screen, and another menu comes up to change the color. Tap “Swatch” in that menu to get to the color swatch.

This is the awesome feature… It creates a color swatch from the colors in your image, so you can match the color of the grid to the colors in your image. Now you can tap the different options to change the color of the grid and see what looks best with your photo. It makes a big difference to change from the basic black of the preset options to a color from the swatch. Look for the Swatch menu anywhere you see the Color icon. It may not be available in all menus and presets, but it’s worth it to check.

Here’s the sequence of added effects I used for Brandon’s photo, starting with Preset > Grid effect…

Then adding a Preset > Shift effect, again using the swatch to adjust the color…

And finally another Preset > Shift effect to add in the colored pixels…

For my image, it was a similar process using similar effects, although I wanted the vanishing lines on the right side of the photo instead of the left. Try as I might, none of the options in iColorama would allow me to rotate that effect to the opposite side, so I rotated my image instead. Here’s what it looked like coming out of that step:

Remember you have lots of tools that you can use interchangeably! Don’t get stuck thinking you have to work in a linear fashion in one app. Here’s the final application of geometric effects for my photo:

Step 6 – Finishing Touches

After adding the geometric effects, the images were almost done. Just a few finishing touches to close things off!

For Brandon’s photo, the right edge of his face got lost in some of the processing. No worries! I blended the final geometric version with the earlier black and white version in Image Blender, bringing back the structure of his face without losing the impact of the edit:

For me, I had a couple of things to do. First, I didn’t like the brighter spot of my hair in the upper left corner or the fact the pixels did not end neatly on the edge of the screen on the right side. So I took care of that with a crop in Snapseed.

Second, I didn’t like how my lips looked chapped. Anyone who is around me for even a short length of time knows I’m obsessive about applying Chapstick, so how did that happen? The roughness seemed to be highlighted by the color conversion, and I thought it was a distraction. (Not to mention, once I noticed it, I needed to apply Chapstick every time I saw the photo because it looked so uncomfortable! See? Obsessive.) So I used Retouch in Handy Photo and cleaned things up to even out the bright spots.

Voila! Finished photo… You will now see it everywhere on my social media streams. Fun!

Your turn!

So what do you think? Are you ready to try creating a more interesting profile photo for yourself? What colors and effects will you choose to represent your personality? It’s your turn to create a profile photo that shows the true you!

And for one lucky person, I will create a profile photo for you! Just leave a comment with what colors and effects would represent you this week, and I’ll randomly select one of the commenters to win. I’ll contact the winner via the email to get a starting photo. Should be fun!

May 3, 2016 by Kat

The Power of Play

I’m a big believer in experimentation and play. It’s one of the things I love about the medium of iPhone photography — it’s so experimental. I get to play with new apps and new techniques all the time. I can sit down and say, “Let’s see where this goes…” on any given morning.

Like with this image, Underlying Structure. I had no idea in my head of what it would look like. Just a couple of ideas of apps or techniques to start with, and let’s see what happens. Let’s play. Interesting things always result. Maybe not the best art, but a worthwhile use of my time. I always feel refreshed after my “play” time.

I listened to a great Ted Radio Hour podcast this weekend that got me thinking about this, called Press Play. If you have a bit of time, give it a listen. It may change your thoughts on whether play is something we should do when all other work is done, or whether play is something we should make a priority. (And if you have a teenager who loves video games, it includes some good insights on video game play that may shift your thinking.)

As adults, we no longer get told this, so I will do the honors: Go and play.

April 1, 2016 by Kat

Castles on the Sand (A Mobile Tutorial)

Part of living a creative life is exploring new techniques and learning new tools. I’ve been doing more and more with an app called iColorama, an amazingly featured and versatile artistic app. This tutorial on how I created “Castles on the Sand” will give you an example of a few features you will find inside this app.

The image starts with a walk on the beach in Bandon. Our spring break trip was quite rainy, but we had some clear patches each day for a walk on this amazing beach. The tide was going out so the wet sand was perfect for reflections, and a storm was blowing in so there was this amazing light and sky.

My starting image is not perfect. It’s not even on focus! I’m not sure if I just missed getting the focus right (I can’t tell unless I have my reading glasses on, which I didn’t), or if it was blowing so hard I couldn’t hold the camera still (I do remember wind), but either way it’s out of focus. But the shapes, light, and reflections are perfect, so I thought…I’ll try a painterly look!

The first step of the edit was in Snapseed, to change the color tones to a more monochromatic look using a Vintage filter without the vignette. As much as I like iColorama for a lot of things, the color filters are not my favorite. I’ll usually start in Snapseed, Mextures or Stackables if I want to change the color tones.

Isn’t this a nice blue?

Next into iColorama. Since I’m going for a painterly look, I start with the Painterly filters, found in Style on the main menu. The way iColorama works, the main menu is always at the top. After you select a main menu, a submenu appears below it to scroll through, left to right. Look for available Presets in the bottom right, which will pop up effect options you can scroll through (top to bottom) if there are any available. In the bottom left, you will find an Opacity slider which allows you to reduce opacity and blend with the previous image if you want to reduce the intensity of a given effect.

This screen shot is from the iPad, which gives you a lot more room for all of these menus and options. The menus can be found in the same relative location on the screen with the iPhone version, but you don’t see as many options at a time and they will overlap the image. To close a pop up menu, like the Preset options on the right, just tap the Preset icon again. You can tell which menus and options are on at any given moment by the blue text and highlighting.

I liked the simplified edges of the Painterly 3 filter at 100% Opacity, shown here.

That was a good start, but I wanted more variation in the feel of the painted look so I decided to “paint” it myself, which you can do from the Brush menu. Unlike many painterly effects in apps which apply an effect to the whole image, in the iColorama Brush menu you actually get to paint!

Choose a type of Brush, I chose Bristle here, and then look at your options. There are different Presets, which in his case determine how much you smear color from one area to another, different brush shapes and other settings. You can change the color of your background canvas from white as well.

Along with the usual Opacity slider on the left, you can also change size and stroke opacity for your brush. There are so many options it can be overwhelming, so to get started stick with the defaults and play around. You know me, I’m all about learning from experimentation! A finished product doesn’t have to come out at the end.

As you get into this type of detailed brush work, you are going to want to zoom and pan to see exactly what is going on with your brushstrokes. You do that my tapping the Zoom Move option on the left of the window. When this option is highlighted, you can zoom in and out using two fingers and pan the image using one. When you are ready to brush again, just tap to turn off the Zoom Move menu.

You’ll also note on the left that you have a few undo options. Undo will remove the last stroke (unfortunately it doesn’t have a longer memory than the last stroke!), Erase will allow you to erase an area back to blank canvas, and Clean will revert the whole image back to blank canvas. Don’t you love digital painting? Can’t do any of that with real paint and canvas!

I played with a couple of options on this image. My first one left a bit of blank canvas in places, shown here.

I thought those bits of white were distracting even though I liked the variation they added, so in the end, I painted the whole image.

I still added variation through the stroke texture and color blending that happens in the painting process. You can see that better in an enlarged view.

I didn’t feel this was quite done yet, so I went back into the Style menu and played with more painterly options. I liked one of the Presets from the Water menu, which gave more contrast to the edges of the rock as well as color variation in the open spaces, but still brought through the stroke variation I had added in the prior painting step. It also brightened the color back up. And this felt done! Here is the final image again:

You are going to see me using this app more and more. I’ve had it forever and recommend it in my book, Art with an iPhone, but didn’t start using it regularly until #30edits pushed me out of my comfort zone. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. As I continue to learn, I will share with you. I’d love to see what you do with it!

October 17, 2015 by Kat

On the Other Side (Mobile Tutorial)

I have been loving the recent change of season. Autumn is one of my favorite times of year. It’s the combination of light, color, and emerging bare branches which inspire me creatively. It’s been fun to get back into editing and experiment with a few new techniques, so it’s time to share a Mobile Tutorial from a recent edit.

I created this piece, “On the Other Side,” yesterday morning and it’s the perfect candidate. I was looking to see how abstract I could go and still retain the feel of the light on leaves. I like the balance of contrast, color and abstraction I was able to achieve in the final piece.

Here is how I created it…

I started with an image captured in ProCamera with the iPhone 6s. (If you missed it, see my first impressions of the iPhone 6s here.) I composed for the lines of the main branches, knowing I could eliminate the branches from the tree behind in post processing.

My first step in post-processing is eliminating those extra tree branches using Handy Photo.

Next step is start altering color and effects. The colors are just too… real. I altered the color using the Tone effects in iColorama. This is an amazingly full-featured app that I am trying to use more. You can get lost in it, there are so many effects and options.

Continuing with artistic effects in iColorama, I experimented with different effects and ended up here:

I liked the shapes and the smearing of the color, but this has gone too abstract. You can no longer tell what it is. Time to reign it back in by blending with other images. To create some alternate images for blending, I started with Autopainter, one of my go-to artistic apps, on the toned image from iColorama:

And also ran the toned image through Autopainter II, for the chalk effect:

Now it’s on to blending using Image Blender. First, the iColorama output with the Autopainter output:

And then with the Autopainter II output:

It’s getting there. There are several problems I need to fix:
– The leaves are still too abstract, so I want to add some shape to them.
– The color is too blue-purple, so I want more warmth.
– The bottom open area of the image is too patchy, with some abrupt transitions, so I want to fill it in a bit.

I can solve the first problem, the abstraction, by blending the image back with one of the original photographs to add the structure of the leaves. Then, I can use color filters and textures to shift the color and fill in the open area. To do this I used a couple of texture apps in sequence. First, textures in XnView Photo FX. You can see how the color has started to shift and the texture has evened out the background.

And finally, with Radiance and Grunge layers in Mextures, adding further texture and shifting color to achieve the final state:

I just love the transformation you can create with a few apps on a photograph. It’s magical!

If you would like to learn more, you can preorder my book on Amazon, Art with an iPhone: A Photographer’s Guide to Creating Altered Realities. It includes information on these and other apps, tips on blending, and much, much more. Thanks for your support to make the book a success!

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