Fantasy: An iPhoneography Apps Tutorial

A guest post by David Hayes

A winter image created using a whole bunch of iPhoneography apps!

(TouchReTouch, Color Lake, Jazz, Mextures, Blender, Distressed Fx, Repix and Snapseed)

(I think I outdid myself this time….)

I have a new Brittany puppy. For those of you out there who know anything about Brittany’s know what that means. Constant motion…all the time. She is a love but I do find myself out on walks with her a lot. This is both good and bad…but I digress…

On one such walk, after a snowfall, I grabbed this shot with my iphone5 camera app. I just loved the starkness and geometry of the scene…so wintery. Later I started working with this image and after a few false starts, my muse finally became inpatient with me and took over. What I eventually created was nowhere near what I had first imaged! Let me show you what she “made” me do…

I started with opening the image in TouchReTouch to remove what I considered to be distracters in the image–things like the small tree, bench, and fence in the background–as well as the building behind the tree.

In this screen shot I’ve “painted” the tree before removing it…

And here’s the scene with all those things removed. At this point I wasn’t sure where to go next, so I played around with several ideas that have since been moved to “Trash.” It wasn’t until I let my muse take over that things started to happen!

Following her lead, I opened the image in Color Lake. Playing around with the level of reflection and Wave Size…

I came up with this version. From here I knew where I wanted to take this image!

Jazz! This is such a cool app to work with. Not only can you let it roll the dice and come up an almost infinite combinations of settings, you can also key in your own! I’m going to skip the steps I took to come up with my combination and just tell you. I first picked the version on the bottom left…

Using the selection menu, I plugged in these settings:

Tones: 12, 2, -27, -18
Color: 10, -10, Blues 0, Greens -1
Tint: 46, 208
Sharpen: 49
Plastic & Glass: Worm Pinhole: -28, 5

(Just open each of the categories–the numbers refer to the setting in order within these categories.)

And…this is what you get! Feeling cold yet?

Time to layer on some textures! Going to another favorite app, Mextures, I went to the Grit & Grain pack. In this pack I chose “Blizzard.” (Seemed fitting….)

Going to the different Blending Modes available, I picked “Color Dodge” at 56%. Saving this step to my camera roll…time to move to the next step!

Here’s where I’m at after Mextures. I took a short break and came back to consider where to go from here…and that was Distressed FX for some birds!

After opening the image in Mextures, I scrolled the top selection bar until I reached “Birds.”

Clicking on this tab opened a pop-up menu and although you can’t see it in this screen shot, I chose “Reunion” which gave me the cluster of birds you see to the top left and right of the tree. (There are more birds in this selection but you can’t see them, as they’re lost in the branches.)

Birds are great, but this image still needed another element. A moon!

Time to use Blender! I first opened my image in Blender (A) followed by a stock shot I have of a full moon (B). Clicking on the “Arrange” tab (C), I was ready to size and place the moon in its proper place.

Moving the moon to the top right corner and shrinking it down to fit the scale of my composition (A), I clicked on the check mark (B) to set this into place.

Time to do some blending. I opened this menu and eventually decided to use “Overlay” at the indicated setting. (I like how the this puts the moon in the background and gives it an air of mystery.)