We have been having some gorgeously sunny autumn days, which means the trees really get to show their colors here in Oregon. We have to take advantage of this photographic opportunity when this happens, because you never know when it’s going to rain again and knock the leaves off of the trees.

I haven’t gotten out to photograph nearly as much as I should, but the fall colors have turned my attention back to the trees and I’m having a fabulous time playing with edits. Today I’ll share a very easy mobile tutorial, combining two autumn images into this piece, called Fading.

The base image is of the tree branches, captured in ProCamera 7. It was a foggy morning and the fog hadn’t lifted yet, giving me a nice blank background.

I started with Snapseed, using the Grunge filter to change the tones. The Grunge filter can have dramatic effects, or can be more subtle when you dial back the texture and the edge blur as I did here.

Next, the image went into Distressed FX to add a texture. The bottom image is ready to blend with the top image at this point.

For the top images, I started with this image of leaves.

Starting with Snapseed again, I changed the tone and contrast. To do this, I used both the grunge and Retrolux filters.

I didn’t like how the leaves in the bottom corner were starting to distract me, and I didn’t think they would blend well, so into Handy Photo for some clean up. Amazing what you can do with this app, isn’t it?

Now the top image is done, so it’s time to blend the two in Image Blender. I adjusted the size and location of the top image relative to the bottom, so that they would overlap in a pleasing way.

I wanted more texture in the final image, so the last step was editing in Pic Grunger. This app is new to me and it gives some great texture effects. Here’s the final image again:

A simple yet effective use of two images to show the transition of the seasons. And now, I need to get out and get some more fall images, while I can!