Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge-Week 11-Text on Photos

Posted on May 4, 2014 by sassmuffins

We join weliveinaflat and Firebonnet this week for the text on photos challenge. The Moldiv and Studio apps are very well reviewed at weliveinaflat, and I encourage you to see all of her fine examples, and great thoughts on the many wonderful uses for text on photos.

I decided to give a few examples using the Over app, after discovering it via Instagram. This is a paid app for the iPhone and iPad. You are also able to purchase additional packs/fonts with this app, although I think the standard ones are very nice. Over has a simple little half-circle “disk” off to one side that allows you to easily scroll to “add”, “edit”, “save”, “share”, etc, so is quickly learned. It also has some interesting standard fonts like “Goon”, “Live Simply”, and “Lanhy”. They are all a little more handwritten and rather free-spirited than most fonts, and give a nice modern touch to your photos. Over also lets you add artwork, including some selections where you can add a preselected word or words to your photo.

Here are my examples of Over using these preselected words. First is a photo of the area in west Austin near where I live (but no I don’t have a home…or views…like this).

The second photo is one I also took in a small town west of here, and altered using my own filters made with Mextures, which I can safely say has become my new favorite photo app! Made that red rock really red!! Word added courtesy of the Over app.

So, go ahead and try out the Over photo app; I think you will like it. It seems that text on photos really works best if you can apply it over more solid color areas of a photo. This way the text doesn’t get lost in the photo’s details.

Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge-Week 10-Color Splash

Posted on April 20, 2014 by sassmuffins

Welcome to Week 10 of the Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge. Color Splash, or basically a way to bring out a singular color or splash of color in an otherwise black and white photo – is something I have always wanted to learn how to do. After reading over all the great advice from hosts We Live in a Flat and Firebonnet, I jumped right into this challenge!

Selective color is a post-processing technique where most of a photo is converted to black and white, but some parts are left in color… The selective color technique emphasizes parts of the photo and draws more attention to the subject.

After reading the post at We Live in a Flat, I checked out the app PicsArt, and found it very easy to use to apply this effect. The effect can also be applied via Leonardo, but it uses masking and is a little more difficult to apply. Here is a short video on color splash in the app Leonardo.

After looking at some other color splash examples, I decided to use a photo of my cat Tyler’s eyes. but with alterations first, of course!

Original Photo of Tyler

After basic editing in Afterlight, I pulled three photos (Tyler’s eyes, and two quilt photos) into the app Split Pic Pro. (Hint: Photograph fabric, walls, floors, anything with texture to save and use in “combined” photos at a later date.) This app allows you to quickly select several photos to place in a collage, and then blend together. The blending level is easily done via a slide bar. Here are the three photos I used in the app, with blending applied.

And another photo after application of filters to each photo, again easily accomplished directly within the screen you are working on. Just highlight each separate photo, and a selection of filters will be at the bottom of the screen, as seen here:

I chose filters that would better highlight my main subject. Those two quilt photos added some nice texture – abstract art – to my kitty’s face! Once happy with these additional edits in the Split Pic Pro app, I saved the photo and then pulled it into PicsArt for the final color splash application. I even tweaked the eye color to make the eyes more blue within the color splash screen.

App Challenge Image
Abstract Cat

Mobile Device: iPhone 4s
Apps Used: Afterlight, Split Pic Pro, PicsArt

I simply love these photos of my sweet kitty Tyler. Part cat – part art!! Meow.

Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge-Week 9-Double Exposures

Posted on April 11, 2014 by sassmuffins

This week’s photo challenge will be a difficult one for me, I think. Welcome back to Week 9 of the Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge hosted by We Live in a Flat and Firebonnet. This challenge is discovering ways to create double exposures. We Live in a Flat describes them this way:

If you have a film camera that allows you to expose the same frame twice to different subjects, you will end up with a photo that comprises the two scenes overlapping each other. Photos taken using this method are called double exposures. And in the case where there is more than two times the frame is exposed, the result becomes a multiple exposure.

I love the link to the video tutorial for good double exposures on We Live in a Flat’s site, especially the end of the tutorial that explains how to quickly create a double exposure in Photoshop. However, since we are focusing on photo apps, I decided to try that same technique in my new app Leonardo, which also allows for double exposures.

It does seem that photos often look better with this technique in black and white; also I’ve noticed that photos where at least one photo is not too “busy” also work well. So here goes…

I chose to use a photo of the Houston skyline, already adjusted in Afterlight and Mextures. Then I took a quick photo of my husband’s eyes, again edited in Afterlight and converted to black and white. As a “half” photo, I also knew the blending would be easier, so cropped the eyes appropriately. Then I pulled both photos into the Leonardo app. Here they are:

Leonardo-Choose 2 photos to blend

Then, using the “blend” mode offered in the lower right-hand side of the screen, I selected the “burn” mode from the choices given. This one seemed to blend the two photos best. Once that was selected I fine-tuned the opacity on the eye photo so that the eyes blended better with the sky.

Leonardo-Adjusting the Opacity Levels

Having the original of the eyes in black and white caused them to be blue like the sky, achieving just the effect I was after! Success!! Here is the final photo.

App Challenge Image
Eyes in the Sky

Mobile Device: iPhone 4s
App Used: Afterlight, Mextures, Leonardo

Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge – Week 2 – HDR

Posted on February 22, 2014 by sassmuffins

My Photo of the Week
County Road 281, Texas Hill Country

App Challenge Image
Waves in the Sky

Mobile Device: iPhone 4s
App Used: Snapseed

The Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge (hosted by We Live in a Flat and Firebonnet) this week was altering photos with HDR and saturation. I think using HDR, or high dynamic range, in photos works especially well with outdoor scenes. I used the HDR filter in my Snapseed app to get the desired effect with this beautiful Texas hill country back road! I also did some light cropping (to remove phone pole in front of trees, and the “straighten” feature in Snapseed. When I initially applied the HDR filter it was a little strong, so I reduced it from the default setting of 85 to 50. This made for a slightly more subtle effect, but still worked to bring out the grainy texture of the gray road and the lovely soft wave of the clouds in the sky that day. They were truly rather unusual.

Want to have fun and participate in the photo challenge, or just visit the other entries? Just click on the Snappy H’appy Logo at the top of this post!

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Snappy H’appy Photo Challenge-Week 11-Text on Photos