Thursday, July 10, 2014

Tutorial Creating Composite Photographs in Filterstorm Neue

Aloha dear reader, 

First, let's begin with a definition of a composite photograph:

A composite photograph is one that has been created by superimposing two or more separate photographs (or smaller parts/sections of other photographs) and can also include other elements such as textures and overlays.

After recently uploading a couple of composite photographs created using Filterstorm, iPhone photos and Stackables layers, I had a few requests about how I achieved these effects, so I thought it might be helpful if I created a very basic tutorial to demystify the process.

Before we begin, I would like to recommend you get a stylus pen, I use a Targus brand, with a rubber tip, there are lots of different types of styluses, I suggest you start with one that feels good in your grip, but you might need to experiment as to whether you prefer the rubber tip or a more pen like tip.  I am used to the grip on the rubber tip and like the feel of it better than the other ones I've tried. 

You'll also need to get Filterstorm Neue https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/filterstorm-neue/id728479183?mt=8 from the App Store if you haven't already.

Step 1

. Open Filterstorm app on your iPhone

Step 2

. Select Photos and then select Camera Roll
. Select your first iPhone photograph for editing

You should now see your image on the screen with a menu list of options down the left hand side of the screen.

You can zoom in and out of your image by using two fingers to pinch together (to zoom out and make smaller) or move fingers apart (to zoom in and make larger). 

Step 3

. Select 'Edit' from the left hand menu
. Scroll down the menu and select +Image
. Select Camera Roll again
. Select the second image you want to add to the first image

Step 4

There are a couple of different ways I achieve superimposing my second image.  Here's the first way:

. With two fingers, you can now pinch the first photograph, to move it into the location you are happy with in relation to the second photograph.  You are looking at the composition here and figuring out where the placement should be.  This is where you put to use all that you've learned regarding composition.  You need to take into consideration where the place of say, a figure, should be, in relation to the first image.  In my case, with the adding the boy, I needed to pinch my first image smaller, and move it to the left, so that the boy would be large enough and positioned on the right hand side of the first image.

. Once you feel that you've accomplished the correct positioning, select the brush tool.  You will notice that the second image you imported has disappeared, but it's actually still there in the layer beneath the first image.

You should now see a set of Masking Tools now, you need to select the first brush in the set on the left hand menu.  You can now (or at any time) adjust the strength of the brush (size and opacity) in the sliders at the bottom of the screen.

Using your stylus pen, begin 'erasing' the first photo to reveal the part of the second image that you want in your composite photograph. After this, you can zoom in by pinching your fingers apart on the screen.

Once the elements are revealed from the second image, it's time to select the eraser or the third 'brush' from the menu on the left hand side of the screen. 

To adjust the strength of the eraser brush, select the 'cog' and the sliders will reappear in another window that opens on the right hand size of the screen, to adjust size and opacity.  After  you've adjusted to the strength you need, it's time to erase the parts around the second image, to make it look perfectly blended with the first image.

Step 5

When you are happy with your composition, select the 'tick' or 'check' to apply changes.

Step 6 

. Finally, select 'edit' from the left hand menu
. Then select 'export', you should see another menu open on the right, from here you can select 'Get Image Size' to find out how the edits affected your file size and then select 'Save Image'.
. You should see another menu appear from the bottom of the screen and from here you can select 'Save Image'.

Step 7

. Go to your native Camera app on the iPhone to check that your new composite photograph has been saved to your Camera Roll.

I hope this helps those of you who are interested in trying out this technique with your iPhone photos!  Feel free to share this post with the link, on your favourite social network platform and be sure to visit me at the links below to see more of my art and photography!  Have an aloha kind of creative day!  

Karin


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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Silver Gull - making the most of mistakes




































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Aloha dear reader and thank you for visiting my blog!!  I am sharing today about a mistake I have made, with a really lovely image, however, I've learned a lot from my mistake, and that's really what I want to share.  After completing a course with Emil Pakarklis through iPhone Photography School, iphonephotographyschool.com I now have a much better understanding about what makes a good iPhone photo.

I took this with my iPhone 5 at the beachfront on a day where the seagulls were being thrown left over takeaways from a picnic, the couple left, but the seagulls stayed behind and were eager for me to feed them too.  Unfortunately that day, I had nothing to give them, but when I motioned upward to the sky with my arm, they would fly off the ground or the perches, in search of the morsel I'd apparently thrown them (as you can imagine, this didn't go on for very long before they realised I was tricking them).  This gave me ample opportunity to shoot in burst mode.  I capture 2 to 3 great shots out of possible 80-100.  So, where did I go wrong?

The first issue I noticed, was that after I cropped this image quite a lot, there was visible grain. I could have used a tripod, to help me avoid shaking, I could have kept the original file and tried cropping it less severely, and I also could have tried some other techniques in turning it to black and white, using filters that cause less problems with resolution and compression of the file when saving it, I could have re-edited it a number of different ways also, and chosen the best possible one with the least grain.  Doing these things would have resulted in a larger image file, (as this is less than 1MB) and possibly less grain.  I could also have set exposure onto the overexposed eareas on his head and wing, to make them less overexposed, before I took the shot, by setting exposure first.  I also could have taken the photos in the native amera app which has a faster burst mode than the app I use called Camera+

Instead of deleting the photo completely, I found it still sitting in my Dropbox last night, and it really is a lovely photo, I wasn't able to just dispose of it altogether, so despite feeling a bit upset that it's really not something good enough to print out on it's own, I've realised that it might be something valuable that I can keep and use later on, as I'm about to undertake another course, this time through Bob Weil who was iPhoneographer of the Year by IPPA.  This course is about using parts of photos to make another complete image, they are called composites.  So, all is not lost and this photo could still be valuable if used as part of another piece, rather than just on it's own where the quality issues might show too much.

So, I thought I'd share it with you, after applying some texural overlays and filters, I think the grain now looks a little less noticeable and I get away with it ....just!

Thank you for reading, please feel free to share my post on your favourite social network platform and visit my art gallery at redbubble, and photo galleries at EyeEm, Instagram and Tumblr and my print shop and follow me on Facebook and Twitter,  to follow my journey see  more of my paintings, photography, drawings, writing, etc. at the links below.

Have a beautiful aloha day full of creativity my friends!


Saturday, July 5, 2014

Golden Snails and Jumping Spiders

Aloha dear reader,

It is my pleasure to share with you, some of the iPhone macro photos I took yesterday in my own backyard.  I was looking around for something to photograph and there seemed precious little, perhaps it's because the winter chill is now feeling more bitterly cold than it has in past days.

I noticed a leafhopper and took a few shots, they are beautiful but hard to capture, so that didn't work out, then I noticed these little tiny snail shells, no more than 2mm in size, they were all over our fence, but each time my clumsy fingers tried to grip one, it would fall and I lost 5 of these in total.  I nearly lost this one, because I breathed too closely near it and it flew off the bench I was using, yes, that's how tiny these little things are, and I don't know why they aren't surviving.  Perhaps the ants get to them, I'm not sure...but they do make for a lovely photo, with their translucence letting the light come through their pretty shells, giving them golden tones.



I then was on my way inside, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a jumping spider, and a big one compared to some I've seen, he must have been around 3mm, just perfect for the 10x Olloclip macro lens to capture, now, I thought, if only I can get a few shots.   Trouble was, he was wedged in a hedge and I didn't like my chances, so I used a stick initially, but he didn't want to jump onto it, so I ever so gently plucked the leaf he sat on, and then we had our little photo shoot, possibly 200 photos were taken to get just three optimal shots, but I was really glad for time spent with this cutie.  I just adore these little fellows.  They display a defensive behaviour when you follow them, and that is jumping right on you or at you.  In my case, they seem to like to jump either on my hand, up my sleeve or directly onto the lens itself.  You need a fair bit of patience to capture them, unless you are lucky enough to come across one that is in a perfect position already with the light just right, it can be a little bit tricky.  They move a lot, and often around in circles.  You learn to predict their movements so you can get into position beforehand, but still, it's tricky and can be frustrating.

I took these with the Camera+ app for iPhone and edits were done in various apps.  The first two images were edited in Snapseed, going for the black and white with a red filter applied.  The bottom three images were edited in Filterstorm. and the final image you see here, was edited in a combination of Filterstorm and Stackables.

Thank you for visiting my blog today and reading my post, viewing my photography, I appreciate it very much, please don't hesitate to share this post on your favourite social media platform, with a link back to me here.  Have an aloha day!

Cheers, Karin

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Friday, July 4, 2014

The Joy of Experimentation: iPhone Olloclip Macro Photography



Aloha dear reader and welcome to my blog!

As you can see, I've been very busy taking iPhone macro photos of my latest favourite thing, glycerol!!!  Thanks to a lovely friend pointing me in this direction, I've been experimenting, and if you were to see me now, you would think I was surely a mad professor.   I have been so excited about this whole new adventure, I seem to barely sleep, eat or breathe....which are all necessary for living...!!!

I hope you like these, they are just a few of my favourites.  I'm sure you'll be curious as to how these were taken and want to know a little more, so I thought I'd share a little bit about how these were captured.

How these effects were achieved.

1. I experimented here with a tall glass tumbler, inside it I stuffed some colourful wool.  On the outside of the glass, I used a glass eyedropper to apply some glycerol and let it drip.  With Camera+ I set the mode to 'burst' and took a series of images while the drip was moving down the glass. I purchased glycerol at my local pharmacy for about AUD$7.  What you see here is the wool fibre being 'reflected' or shown through the glycerol.  Not sure that reflection is quite the right word.

2. Next up, we have what is actually a leaf stalk held upside down, with a drop of glycerol applied to it.    In the background, you can't see anything, because I've masked it out in Filterstorm app, using the black and white mask, only partially, over the background area, I removed all the background, using a stylus pen with a rubber tip.  To create the decorative effects, I transferred the image in Procreate for iPad and worked with the stylus pen and brushes in the app, to create this rather lovely fresh pattern, underneath the stalk wasn't all that attractive so here I just tried to beautify it for aesthetic reasons.  You'll see in image #3 why, the stalk just isn't all that pretty.  The reflection this time is a ball of wool or wool fibre that was very colourful.

3. Same as 2, except in the reflection we have blue raffia/dried grass like stuff you buy from the local $2 shop in the craft section.  I thought it was a neat effect, so voila!!!  I hope you like it!  The blue in the background, is of course, the blurred raffia.  When you take photographs with the olloclip macro lens, it automatically blurs the background, so what you see here, is edited slightly but not much really, just cropped and a little brightened and contrasted in Filterstorm.

4. this one is again, the stalk of a dried leaf that blew into my backyard from a neighbouring tree.  I don't know what the name of it is sorry about that, I must ask my neighbour to identify it for me.   The tip has a blob of glycerol, which is an oily clear substance, and works well for shine and is sometimes a little bit heavier and more stable (and shiny) than water.  I also love using water.  I've altered the colours ever so slightly in Filterstorm, I am not sure, but I don't think anything was being reflected deliberately this time.

5. This was fun to create!!  I got some dried water paints that were about $2 for the set, I wet them and when semi dry, I gouged some out and applied them to the glycerol drop, which this time I sat on a mirrorred surface which is how the reflection of the glycerol comes about, and in the background, I set up an old colourful paint palette, which had leftover dried paint on it, so that it too would add to the reflections being cast.

6. Lastly this is a glycerol drop also, but this time, I placed the glycerol directly onto an old paint palette covered in dried paint, here I dropped it right on top of some silvery gold pigment and later I did edit this quite a lot, using filterstorm and filterstorm neue, to add colour and foreground, while subtracting a lot of the background to make the drop pop.

Thanks for visiting my blog, I am looking forward to sharing with you more often!!

Have a wonderful aloha day, please feel free to share my blog posts with a link back to me here, on your favourite social media platform and visit my other links, especially my art gallery and print shop at redbubble www.redbubble.com/people/karin and like my FB and Twitter pages if you'd like to keep updated and watch my journey unfold!

Karin

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