I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday over this much needed break.
Alright, on with the post. In my first post, I used a technique that was mentioned in the first chapter of my book, "iPhone Obsessed: Photo Editing Experiments with Apps" by Dan Marcolina. As I continued reading, the second chapter is all edited pictures so there wasn't much I could do with that. Chapter 3 contained ways to "grunge" up a picture but I felt that none of the pictures I had would be able to capture that effect in the correct way. Blurs and vignettes are used in chapter four, but I (again) felt that none of my pictures would go well with this effect. Finally, I came across chapter 5: Toon Looks. I've always loved the way that old cartoons look (such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) so I knew that I'd have to give this one a try.
As a bit of an introduction to the chapter the author states, "Stripping away the detail and leaving just line and color is a nice way of adding interest to an uninteresting photo... It can help clarify your idea or give it ambiguity. Either way, the result is injected with a bit of humor or wit by the cartoon effect" (Marcolina 58). With this in mind, I didn't want to use a completely uninteresting photo and I wanted to do something on a bigger scale so I decided on a panoramic picture I took at a Seattle Mariner's game once:
Currently, I have an Apple iPhone 5C which is the device used for the editing. For this experiment, the author took an image of a Silk Orange Tree and wanted to enhance it using the toon look (Marcolina 69). I wanted to recreate what he had done using the same technique. The recommended apps that the author stated were ToonPaint, Blur FX, and DXP (which I used previously on my first post). In the app store, the full version of ToonPaint is $1.99. I didn't want to spend that money so I downloaded the free version of the app. BlurFX cost $0.99 which isn't that bad so I paid for it and I would be able to use this in the future. Since I already had DXP from the previous blog post, I did not need to re-download it, but to those wondering, it is a free app.
The first step is to use ToonPaint to "Export black line and gray conversion" (Marcolina 69). Within the app, I set the black line to 50% and the gray to 100%. This is the final product of that:
Next up is to use BlurFX and "Median-blur original image at about 65. Add saturation and stroke in some soft hints" (Marcolina 69). With picture number 2, I median-blurred the image to 65% (as said in the book) and in picture number 3, I increased the saturation to 100%.
Finally, use DXP to "Merge steps 1 and 2 with multiply blend mode" (Marcolina 69). Once your in the app, you must load the blurred image (#3) from your camera roll, then load the black and white one (#1) using the "load for mask" button to get the final product. When I did this, I got:
Through this experiment, I have expanded my knowledge in several ways. First of all, I am now aware of how to use two new apps which can benefit me in the future. I've also learned the impact that an edited image can have (as mentioned above). Personally, I love the way the image turned out. The sky is dark but the field gives that color right in the middle of the image and I find it beautiful.
Here's the final process: (I skipped picture #2 because picture #1 and #3 were the ones that were blended)
What did you think of this process? What would you like to see next?
Side Note: The collage was made and the numbers in the corner were added using PicsArt which is not mentioned in the book. I discovered this app on my own and it is free on the app store :).
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