I can't believe it's already been two months since my first post. Well, I guess time does go by when you're having fun. Let's look at the bright side though, which is that we still have five more months together ahead of us :).
For my final post, I wanted to find something that sort of combines what I've previously learned over this entire process. I also wanted to end with something that I thought was really cool so I chose a technique from chapter seven of Dan Marcolina's book, "iPhone Obsessed: Photo Editing Experiments with Apps.", which is all about Painting looks. This chapter also discusses drawing looks which is the type of edit I did for this post. In my previous posts, I've editing pictures of my dog, friends, and a sports stadium which all had memorable stories behind it. Keeping that theme, I chose a picture that my mom took of me while standing in line for a concert by one of my favorite bands ever. Here that is:
FYI: the shirt I'm wearing is totally true. Anyways, in the introduction to this chapter, the author states that "taking the energy of a photo and minimizing its reality sometimes maximizes its symbolic or emotional qualities" (Marcolina 90). I definitely wanted to capture this with my editing so off I went.
I currently have an Apple iPhone 5C which is the device used for the editing. For this experiment, the author used an image of an old man. He doesn't mention why he chose this image but the final product looks amazing and I wanted to try out the same thing. He used three apps for this experiment, two of which I'm already familiar with. First off is Artist's Touch. Before I get to the others, I'd like to mention that this app was $2.99 on the app store and I didn't want to spend that much so I purchased another app with the same features called Sketch Mee, which is $1.99. Secondly is Tiltshift. I used this app for my third blog post so I'm familiar with it already, but for those new here, that app is also $1.99 on the app store. The third and final app he used was DXP which I've used in a few of my previous posts from the beginning and it's free.
The first step is to use Artist's Touch (in my case, Sketch Mee) to, "clone paint with broad strokes around the man. Change his brush size and paint with more detail on his face and hand" (Marcolina 99). Within the Sketch Mee app, it automatically converts the image into a black and white drawing. I first changed the setting from just a regular pencil to color pencil. I then converted it from hard lines to soft lines. This was the final product of that process:
The second step to take the original image and gauss-blur, saturate, and brighten everything except for the face in the picture using TiltShift" (Marcolina 99). Within the app, set the blur to 5. I then increased the saturation to 2 and the contrast to 1.25. Finally I set the brightness to 1.30. Here's how that turned out:
The final step is to use DXP to combine the painted version with the blurred version through a black-and-white brushed mask. I first uploaded the product from Sketch Mee. Then, I loaded the product from TiltShift and masked them. It automatically masked them in color so I changed the setting to black and white. This is how the mask came out:
Through this experiment I have learned many things. First of all, I can now add one more app to my mind palace that's very easy to use. I've also learned that blurring an image and pairing it with something completely different can look awesome in the end. Finally, this experiment combined much of the prior knowledge I've learned from this book which was very fun and has shown me just how far I've come.
Here's the final process all in one place:
What was the best/most interesting part of this experiment to you? What was your favorite edit that I made or that you've done?
MLA Citation: Marcolina, Dan. IPhone Obsessed: Photo Editing Experiments with Apps. Berkley, CA: Peachpit, 2011. Print.
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