Well, we are down to the second to final post. *Sigh* sad times. Okay, back to happiness :).
For this post, I wanted to do something different from what I've previously done. In my other posts, I used techniques from chapters one, five, and four to edit my pictures. Although there are many different editing techniques found in "iPhone Obsessed: Photo Editing Experiments with Apps." by Dan Marcolina, I decided to go with techniques from chapter three for this post: Grunge. The author recommended using a sharp and clean image for this because the whole idea of "grunging" something is to make it a bit dirtier (Marcolina 28). With this in mind, I searched for a high quality picture with good natural lighting. At last, I came across a picture of a couple of my friends and I on the bus on a field trip.
Don't I look great? Haha. Anyways, in the introduction to this chapter the author states that grunging a picture "takes the story to another era or changes the narrative of the setting, adding an air of mystery or desolation" (Marcolina 28). Of course, I wanted to have a result that captured this idea with my editing.
I currently have an Apple iPhone 5C which is the device used for editing. For this experiment, the author used an image of him in a bathroom mirror. There isn't much on why he chose this picture to edit but I loved the final product of what he had and I wanted to recreate it. He only used two apps for this experiment. The first one was Photoshop Express which is free on the app store and I've used it before so I was already familiar with it. The second app he used was PicGrunger which is $0.99 on the app store.
The first step is to use Photoshop Express to "crop, brighten, convert to sepia, and sharpen" the image (Marcolina 43). Within the app, I did four things. I first cropped the window out of the picture to make it a bit more square. Because the image is already pretty lit, I only had to adjust the exposure to 10. From there, I used the memory filter which is basically what the app had instead of sepia. Finally, I sharpened the image to 90. This is the process of that:
The second and final step is to use PicGrunger to "apply scratches and sepia texture" (Marcolina 43). Surprisingly, this app was very easy to use. I expected that I would need to adjust everything or draw things but I was glad to realize that this was not the case. I simply opened the app, selected a picture, then I was asked what effect I wanted. To go more into detail, I first chose the scratched effect, which is shown below. It was a bit much to me at first so I then decreased the strength to 50. That was basically everything I did because the default was the "Gig" style and sepia effect that the author mentioned. This is what that very short process looked like:
After this whole process, I got this as the final result:
Looks kind of vintage huh? Is it just me? Through this experiment I have expanded my knowledge in a couple of ways. First off, I know now how to use another app that gives a vintage feel to pictures and is very easy to use. I will most definitely be using that app again. I've also learned how making something a bit less clean gives it an entirely new feeling. I loved this picture as the original but I love the way the edit turned out because I feel like it came from an old war album or something. In my photography experience, I never used grunge before and now I love it. I absolutely loved the convenience of this app and the final product was amazing.
Here's the final process: It was nice and easy.
What do you think of this result? Where does it look like it's from to you?
MLA Citation: Marcolina, Dan. IPhone Obsessed: Photo Editing Experiments with Apps. Berkley, CA: Peachpit, 2011. Print.
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