Photo manipulation on your iPad with iColorama

Starting with a good photo and taking it from there.

A perfect sunny day in November with excellent light for taking photos with the iPhone 6 and then doing some Photo manipulation on your iPad. It has an excellent camera and you really can’t go wrong when there is plenty of light. Visiting old fishermen’s cottages by the sea and there is even more light bouncing up off the flat Mediterranean. The place is quaint and cute with white painted houses and boats, decorated with bright primary colours. So here is the first image directly out of the camera and with nothing done to it.

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Castell Beach Fishermens houses

So let’s turn it into something special with iColorama

As soon as the photos were downloaded into the iPad from the Photo Stream I was able to open it up in iColorama. There are lots of different effects to choose from to take an ordinary photo and turn it into something a little bit special. My favourite effect lately has been to use the Flat preset number 18 and take the opacity down to get some pastel colours. I thought I would try something a little bit different today and dive straight into the Coherence effect. This effect gives it a little bit of a dreamy sort of look and like it’s a little bit out of this world. You can find the Coherence effect in the Style menu. You get some fantastic effect with photo manipulation on your iPad in iColorama.

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With the Style/Coherence effect in iColorama you get four different blend modes to choose from, starting with Normal, Multiply which makes it darker, Screen to make it even darker and Overlay which will make it all light and bright. You may then adjust the opacity to further set how you want it. There are also 11 presets you can choose from each giving a slightly different effect. Some of these presets don’t allow you to change the blend mode and with preset number 4 is better if you don’t use the normal mode, at least not at 100% opacity. With one of the other blend modes it will give you a nice textured effect. Don’t forget that you can use the brush mask to remove the effect in certain areas of your image if necessary. So for example the textured effect you get from the preset 4, might not look so good when applied to a sky. Unless your name is Van Gogh. Let’s see if we can make the dream image look a little more like a scary dream or even a nightmare.

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Make it glow

Don’t forget to apply the effect before moving onto the next tool you’re going to use, otherwise you’ll have to go back in again and reset it. Let’s go to the Effects menu and choose Glow. The opacity adjustment slider controls how strong the effect is overall. Then there is the contrast slider and the more you move it to the right the more of a glow you will get. The next slider is for temperature, move it to the left to make it colder with a blue cast appearing on the image. Moving to the right of the centre point and it goes more towards a sepia colour. The last slider controls the overall colour hue and saturation. If you would like to have a different starting point for these controls have a look at the nine presets to see if anything takes your fancy.

Add distortion to turn it into a nightmare

An easy way to add distortion to the image is to change to the Form menu and choose Waves. Adjust the two sliders – Feature and Direction to get the effect you are looking for. What I wanted for the image was for the buildings to look like they were coming out at you in a nightmare style. Scary like you were walking down the main street and suddenly realised you were naked, that sort of dream. It was easy to set up this effect in iColorama by moving the Feature slider to the left so it wasn’t too wavy. Then moving the Direction slider control to set it up just right. It soon starts to look like something you might see if you were out of your head on hallucinogenic drugs.

Photo manipulation on your iPad

Photo manipulation on your iPad

Photo manipulation on your iPad doesn’t have to end there

With Photo manipulation on your iPad you can also go back to the original image and put it into other applications first such as Glitché or Glaze. I put it into Glaze to get some painterly effects even though it is possible to do painting type of things within iColorama. Glaze doesn’t have so many controls available and you have to just take what you’re given with each of the different effects you are able to choose from. You might still want to use it sometimes if it gives you that affect your looking for and you want to get that effect with just one click. Still you’re able to take that image and drop it back into iColorama to tweak it further. Sometimes, if you’re feeling particularly creative it can be hard to know when to stop as the so many choices that you can use within the application iColorama. Then there are even more choices you can have when combining with effects you get from other art applications on your iPad. At least you can save images as you go and maybe even end up with five or six versions of your digital art at the end of the day. Maybe you’ll choose one of them that you will present to the world. Maybe there will be multiple versions you like for different reasons and you can put them into different places, such as the Facebook page for iColorama, The Google Plus Community or just save them all into a Flickr album.

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PDF Version

Book visual - iPad Art Magnet

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iBooks Version

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