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:

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!

I’m back after a fantastic Thanksgiving weekend with my family in Arizona. Oh, was it lovely! Warm sun during the day, chilly evenings by the firepit, hanging out with my family through it all. And a few gorgeous desert sunsets!

I created this piece yesterday morning after returning home, as a remembrance and celebration of my time there. You can tell I’m still enjoying the Circular+ app! I thought it would be great to use the photo I processed in the Circular app, below, as a tutorial on cleaning and cutting for compositing images using the Handy Photo app. This image is actually three different images, blended together. (Don’t look too closely – that cactus is growing out of the roof of a building!)

Today I’m going to share the “Cleaning” part of the edit, and later this week I’ll share the “Cutting” part. For both functions I use the Handy Photo app, because it allows great control of the processes as well as good “undo” features when things don’t work right the first time. Android users rejoice – this app is available to you too!!

Cleaning

What I consider “cleaning” is basically removing distractions I couldn’t compose my way out of at the time of capture. I do this on images before I start with artistic processing.

There are two common ways to remove distractions: Cloning, and content-aware fill. While Handy Photo does both, today we are going to focus on the content-aware fill, which is called “Retouch” in the app. In other apps, like Snapseed, it is sometimes called “Healing.”

Here is my starting image, which I want for the silhouette of the mountains. I need to remove the faint, but identifiable, antenna tower in the silhouette.

First, open the Handy Photo app and load an image from the camera roll, called “Gallery” in this app. Next, you need to open the Retouch menu. To get to the main menu, tap the hand icon in the upper right corner of the screen, and then tap the Retouch menu. There are many more menu options than you can see on the screen. In this app, to navigate you rotate the menu “ring” to see additional menus.

Now that you are in the Retouch menu, you get ready to start by zooming in to the location you want to clean. Do this by using two fingers on the screen. Spread your fingers to increase magnification (zoom in), pinch your fingers to reduce magnification (zoom out), and move two fingers together to pan the image around the screen. You can also double tap on the image to quickly increase magnification to 100%, or decrease magnification to fit the screen.

You have three options in the Retouch menu, which is found in the bottom left corner of the screen. You have a Lasso, Brush and Eraser. For this edit, and most of the time I use Retouch, I choose the Brush to highlight where I want to retouch. (I’ll show you the Lasso in Part 2.)

Once you’ve selected the Brush, a control menu pops out from the right side of the screen. To adjust the size of the brush, tap on the Brush Size control, then slide your finger on the screen, left to reduce the brush size and right to increase the brush size. The brush size is independent of the image size. If you need a finer brush than the app will allow you to set, then zoom in further on your image.

Now that we have everything set, we are ready to Retouch. Using your finger, paint the area you want to Retouch. It will be highlighted red on the screen. If you have an intricate shape you are trying to brush, you can use the Snap to Edge feature. (I’ll show you that in Part 2 as well.) In general, you don’t have to worry about getting exact edges with Retouch. As you can see, I’ve roughly highlighted the antenna and the area around it.

Tap the screen to start the Retouch, and suddenly the antenna disappears! What the app has done is a content-aware fill, where it takes at the pixels around the highlighted area and uses those to fill in. In this case, it worked the first time. In other cases, you might see weird pixels filling in, like pixels from the mountain being added to the sky. If that happens, use “Undo” to go back and start over, brushing a smaller area at a time, starting away from the unwanted pixels.

You can continue “cleaning” by retouching multiple areas within a single session. While you are in the same session, you can keep using Undo and Redo. When you are done and like the result, tap Commit in the lower right corner. Once you Commit, you can no longer use Undo and Redo. After Commit, be sure to save your image to your Camera Roll so you have it in this state for additional processing. To save, look for the disk icon on the Main Menu.

In this case, I also wanted to crop to eliminate the clouds and make the mountain silhouette more prominent. Here is the final “cleaned” image:

Compositing

The next step in the compositing process is to combine two images together. I want the clouds from this image of the same sunset, captured using the Vivid HDR mode in ProCamera, behind the mountains from my cleaned image:

How to do that? Blend using Image Blender. Start with the mountain silhouette as the bottom image and the cloud image as the top image.

In the Arrange function, I move the clouds relative to the mountains using two fingers to pan and zoom, and then tap Save. How do I know where I want the clouds relative to the mountains? I don’t know, when I am starting. I try a composition, save it, then experiment in the next app to see what happens. Sometimes I get it right the first try, but other times I don’t. I decided the clouds should be behind the mountains after experimenting with several versions in Circular.

Now use the Mask function, to mask the mountains and the bottom portion of the image. Using the Brush, you paint on the image to erase the top image where you don’t want it to blend with the bottom. Depending on your images and blend mode, you may need to get to be precise with your mask. You can use two fingers to zoom and pan for precise work. In this case, I don’t have to be precise except in the area the clouds overlap. As long as my mountains are masked and the clouds are not masked, the blend should look fine.

You can also erase the mask if you overshot in an area. To switch from Brush to Erase mode, tap the pencil icon. When the eraser is up, it’s in Erase mode. When the tip is up, it’s in Brush mode. When you like the mask, tap Save. With both the Mask and Arrange functions, if you want to change something, you can always go back into those menus and make adjustments.

Finally, it’s time to blend! For this image, either Darken or Multiply modes will work well. I used Darken, with opacity at 100%. The top image is blended everywhere I haven’t masked, so the sky and clouds appear behind the mountain silhouettes, as they would in real life.

Here’s the final composite image I created, after blending:

Cool huh? Later this week in Part 2, I’ll show you how I got that cactus in there!

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