Creating Art on Your Phone with Texture Apps

1. Introduction: Hello everyone and welcome. I have a question for you. Carry a cell phone like pretty much all the time. Now, do you take photos with that phone? Of course you do, we all do. But do you want to learn a fun and easy way to turn those snapshots into works of art. If so, you are in the right place. I'm Kate Sylvia, a nature photographer, a teacher. And I'm going to show you the tools and methods that will help you think creatively about your images. We're going to do this with the use of three simple apps that we'll use to add textures to your photos. We're going to learn about what to look for in a texture, creating a mood with your textures, and how to get your images ready for success. I think teaching photography for more than 13 years and I absolutely love seeing what my students can come up with. Truly looking forward to seeing your results as well. Let's get started. 2. Your Project: Okay, real quickly let's talk about your projects. I'm going to want you to create three images. One of them should be something that is soft and subtle. It doesn't have to be a flower, doesn't have to be the one that we're going to work on. It can be anything that you think deserves a soft, subtle type of texture applied to it. Second one's going to be something that is gritty and grungy, contrasty and dramatic. So very, very different mood between these two images. I just want to get you experimenting with these textures in different ways. Then the third one we're going to do is something that has either an animal or a person, an insect, something in it that I want you to get used to using the brushes in order to remove the texture from the main subject. The reason for that being that sometimes you use a texture and you really liked the way that it's applied to the overall photo, but it's obscuring or covering up the main subject a little bit too much, especially people or animals, that's something that has eyes. You don't want it to cover up the eyes because you really want to feel that eye contact with your subject. And so I want you to practice removing the texture, the Eraser tools that are available in the three different apps that we're gonna talk about. Great, I can't wait to see what you guys create. Have fun with it. 3. Apps We'll Use: Let's talk for just a sec about the three apps that you're going to need for this class. The first one is called Image Blender, and you can find it in the App Store. It's available on iPad and iPhone. I do not believe it is available for Android at this time. Just so you know, each of these apps do cost a few dollars. Unfortunately, that's Adam, I control. The second app that we're going to discuss is called mixtures. It is available on iPad, iPhone, and Android. This is an incredibly powerful app. We're going to have a lot of fun with this one. And the third one that we're going to talk about is called distressed FX plus. Now there is an app in the App Store that is called distressed FX. Without the plus, it is a little bit different. It has the same basic textures and functions. It just does not have all of the extras, and I will be showing quite a few of those extras. So if you don't want to spend the $12 on this app, which is a bit much for most photo editing apps these days, then don't worry about it. You can just download the regular distressed FX and follow along. And if you decide to upgrade, you can do that. I believe in the app through in-app purchases. This one unfortunately is not available on Android. Provided in the class resources you'll find the images that I'm going to be working on during these demonstrations. You are more than welcome to use these and follow along. You are not required to do so if you want to use your own images, you certainly can. I just want to give these to you. So if you decide you want to follow along, you can. I've also included a couple of sample textures that you can download and bring onto your cell phone or your tablet. So you can follow along with these as well. Now I will be using these in the Image Blender app as well as I believe distressed FX. If you want to use the same textures I'm using, you can download these. Let's talk about textures in general so you can gain an understanding of why we use these. How to pick the perfect one for your photo. See you then. 4. What are Textures and How are They Used: Hello again. Now in years past when we have discussed using textures in photography, most of the time, what came to mind was using textures in Adobe Photoshop, lots and lots of work and kind of a pain. So why is it that I want to do this on my phone or my tablet? I think that the best camera is the one that you have with you if you are a photographer, I'm sure you've heard this before, but it is so true nowadays, phones and tablets are incredibly powerful. They've got wonderful cameras and you can do so much creative stuff with them. There is an absolute freedom in using such a simple device. I actually found out over the last few years that I am doing more editing for fun on my phone than I do on my computer because it's easier, it's faster. And frankly, I just enjoy it. I know we're talking about textures, but I want to give you a little photo advice while you're out there as well. I honestly think using your phone can help with compositional decisions in the field. Whether you want to frame something vertically or change your position up and down, move the sky further up into the image or further down into the image. Maybe switch to a horizontal format. Using a phone just makes it super quick and easy. Experimenting with apps is It's just fun. Here's the same image with a texture added and a little bit of lens light. You can shoot, you can edit and you can share all on the go superfast. And as in all other photography, the mobile device is just another tool to tell a story. And I think that using textures in your images can add to that story. Let's talk a little bit about what to look for when you're choosing what texture to put on your image. What exactly is a texture and how does this work? So you take a normal image that you've taken anywhere, whether it's on your phone or regular DSLR or mirrorless camera. And you take an image of something that has texture to it. These can be hand-drawn or painted or you can just take photos of things that are around you all the time like brick and stone, grass, cotton, clothing, it doesn't matter. Your living room carpet, you can find texture anywhere. You stories, images on your phone so you can just have them all the time. So you can use them in these apps that we're gonna go through in a minute. What happens, at least in Adobe's Photoshop. One image, the texture itself goes on top of your photo. You resize it so that they fit. And then you tell them to communicate with each other through the use of blending modes or masking or something like that. And you can come up with something that is uniquely yours. Now other than Image Blender, the other two apps that we're going to discuss, they have all of this technology built into them. So you don't have to fuss with the layers and all of that. So it was just makes it so much easier and a lot more fun. I think if it's easy, it becomes more fun. Okay, So there are textures that the amount of them is overwhelming. The choices are so varied, they're all very different from one another. Some of them have painterly look, some of them look like grunge or have Bokeh effects on them. And so choosing a texture becomes difficult, especially when there are so many choices out there. And even within the apps that we're going to use, the number of textures and different styles that they offer you within the app itself is almost overwhelming. So I have some thoughts about how to choose a texture for an image like this where I have something that is my focal point, which is the hysteria right there, which is soft, flowery and natural. I want to choose a texture that can complement that subject, something that helps me focus attention on it, or emphasizes the colors. So I'll look for something that has some similar colors and tones to it and apply that as a texture. Here's another image. I actually took this in my home and I have a very plain green background behind this, which is kind of boring, but I wanted to make sure that my background was nice and smooth. What does a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis tell you what does it say to you? For me that is emergence and spring. With spring in my head, I wanted to choose a texture that mimicked that, something that had sprinklers and a nice soft feel to it. This texture has a little bit of a canvas feel to it. So I thought it was really appropriate for this image. Isn't he cute? Yeah. He grew up to be. It's not. But anyway, this is my cat when he was a kitten and I don't want anybody to get the impression that I'm saying textures can just fix any lousy photo because this image has a quality about it. But I really, really like and that is the eye contact. So I wanted to salvage this image in a way that takes away the distracting elements around him and really focuses attention on his face. That cute little fuzzy toy that he's playing with. It's just adorable. It just yells kitten to me, but I've got a power chord behind him. He's underneath a kitchen table here. It just, it looks terrible. So I changed the perspective a little bit. And I used a texture to basically eliminate the entire background around this kitten. And it is so, so much better. Now, I turned a quick snapshot taken with my phone on my kitchen floor and turn it into something absolutely beautiful. It is probably one of my favorite images of my kitten. So here I just wanted to show you the size of this thing. This is a caterpillar and that is my pinky fingers, so it's not even a big fingers, my tiniest finger. And that's how small that caterpillar is. And I didn't use any specialty lenses on my phone or anything. I just zoomed in really tight and got a close up shot of that caterpillar. It is amazing what your phone can do. Now, I used an app called retouch to get rid of the little leaf That's right behind him. And use the app mixtures that we're going to go through today to add a slight overall texture. I ran it through Snapseed, which is one of my go-to apps for just generalized editing. And then I use an app called lens light to add a little bit of a light beam to that. Now we're not going to go over all of these apps today. This is just about the texture apps. Now you've seen a lot of images here of nature and one little animal. But I also want you to know that you can use these with people too. So what is it that I want to say about this image? It's a little girl, she's walking along. We don't have a lot of eye contact, so that's not something that I really need to focus attention on. But I was thinking to myself, what would this look like if I wanted to add a painterly feel? So I went looking through my piles and piles of texture images that I have and found a texture that had painterly like strong painterly strokes to it and added it to this image. Again, you can do this on your phone with that app, Image Blender or distressed FX, anything that we'll talk about today, you can add your own textures. And I had this one in my files as painterly look, I think it looks really cool. Here's another nature image again, just a quick shot of these blooms. It was over water, so you'll see those kind of specular highlights behind it. The only thing that I really wanted to do was add a little bit of a texturize vignette, not just a general darkening of the corners because I can do that in any app. I wanted to do something that had a texture feel to it as well. You can use textures that have a strong frame around them and remove most of the texture from the centralized portion of the image. Okay, so that's basically what I did here, is I removed about 90% of it from the middle of the photo and left-most of it on the outer edge to just kind of add a vignette to this image. What I want you to take away from this is when you are going through these apps and when you're walking through them with me, I want you to think about what you want your image to say. What you want people to focus their attention on in that image. So you can use textures and the vignetting effect of some of these textures to help focus attention on certain areas of your photo. And you can use textures depending on the tones that you're choosing, the types of textures that you're choosing to create an overall feel. If you're doing something that is soft, flowery, close-up macro work of flowers and things like that, I wouldn't necessarily put a grunge looking texture on it. But if I'm doing architecture or automotive, or sports photography or something like that, maybe a grunge texture would work really well with those. Think about what you want to do with the final product. Do you want the texture to emphasize certain colors are areas. Do you want it to de-emphasize certain colors are areas. Do you want a warm tone which reminds people of sunrises and sunsets? Or a cooler tone which might be appropriate for more snow covered winter images, things like that. So think about these colors and the overall feel of the texture that you're about to put on your image. Let's get into these apps. 5. Get Started with Image Blender: Hey everyone, welcome back. For the first app we are going to go over Image Blender. You can see it right here in my photo edit album that I have created on my iPad. Now you can do this as well on your iPhone. I find it much easier to find my favorite apps quickly if I put them in a little grouping either on my phone or my iPad, because over time you tend to accumulate quite a few apps. I'm going to click on Image Blender here. Now the first time you open it, you'll just have a blank screen with no instructions, but that's what I'm here for. On the bottom left to choose the image that you want to bring in. Either your iPhone shot for Android shot, or you can bring over an image from your main computer, one that you've taken on a DSLR or mirrorless camera. It doesn't matter. Just an image. I'm going to click on that on the bottom left and go to my photos. I have albums here to to keep myself a little bit organized. So I'm going to go to my tutorials which I use, for example, photos. And I'm going to choose this beach sunset here. That's my base photo over on the right, I want to choose the texture that I'm going to put on top of this. Now I have a sunset photo. I'll click on that and click on photos and I'm gonna go back to Albums now I have an album with 40 to 50 textures in it. Okay, so I've moved these over again from my main computer. And they are full size JPEG photos. Depending on where you get the textures. Some of them are gonna be a little bit bigger than others. Some of them are gonna be square-shaped, some will be rectangular. It just depends on where you've gotten them and whether or not you've made them yourself as far as the resolution is concerned. What do I want to convey with this photo? Do I want to grunge my sky up quite a bit. So I've got some photos that look like marble and rock here. And just as a little aside here, those images right in the middle that looked like stone. I actually took those at a flooring company when I was looking for fluorine during some renovations. I just I loved the patterns and so any black I said earlier, anything that has patterns or structure or contrast, texture, just take a photo of it and put them all on an album to keep it nice and organized so you can find them when you want. So here we have some images with some snow, some light coming from a corner, some spring-like images. So when I look at my sunset photo and I've got a nice open sky. I know that I'm gonna get a lot of my texture to show through. So do I want that effect to be heavy handed or do I want it to be nice and subtle? So if I wanted something kind of heavy handed, would I pick maybe something like this? That's pretty heavy handed. So if I want to replace that, if I don't like the way that that looks, just click on that little button off to the right again and click Remove and then click on it again to go back to your photos and choose something else. Do I want a nice bokeh effect? I've got some Boca textures that I've created here. That's very subtle. It almost looks like there was a problem with my camera blending mode. And I'll, I'll talk about these blend modes here in a minute, but I just want you to see the whole texture. If I take this slider right down here and I go all the way to the left, I see my image. And if I go all the way to the right, I see the texture. Not sure I liked the bokeh, so I'm going to remove that. Go back to my photos. What it would look like if I chose something that has some streaky value to it. So I like that one. Let's slide it to the right. Now, the first step that I want you to take when you come in here is to change the blending modes. Because sometimes the blending modes can just do wonders job of finding a look that you want really quickly. I'm going to click this double box right here. I'm going to scroll through these. So that's multiply screen overlay. I kinda like what overly does darken, lighten and you can just go through all of these color burn would say, I like Color Burn, but I think it's too much. All I have to do is slide this back and it lessens. It can also, if I click on that again, if I click on the filter, this brings up the texture where I can change some things so I can lower the contrast or I can make it more contrasty. You can lower the saturation or raise it. So let's raise it and see what happens. Let's click Save. Wow. That's pretty dramatic. I'm going to go back here and we'll click that filter again and bring my contrast and saturation back down. That was just too much. Let's click Save. Okay, so where do I want my source of these streaks coming from? Now here's a little hint is that you can reposition and turn the texture as if it's a layer on top of your photo. Picture it like a piece of paper sitting on top of another piece of paper. You can turn that top piece. You can maybe poke a hole through that top piece and we'll talk about that in a minute. But let me reposition this a little bit and see what happens. I'm going to click this button right here. Now it briefly goes back to what your original texture looks like. If I pinch my two fingers in, I can resize it. If I rotate those fingers, I can move this around. You'll see that I've got a rectangular, very rectangular texture, but not a rectangular image. So it's gonna have to stretch and go over the edges a little bit, but that's okay. Let me see what happens if I kinda alter the direction of those streaks by turning the image and bring it up here. And don't worry too much about that bottom corner. I'm not going to worry about that on just concentrating on the sky because I'm gonna teach you how to not worry about that as well. Okay, so let's click the Save button. Okay, so now I have streaks coming from the horizon extending up into the sky and I kinda liked that a little bit better. You might like it the other way. Everybody's got their own taste. It's cool. We're just here to learn. And so now what I'm gonna do is since I've got that little corner where you can kind of see that it's missing. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to press this little edit button, the little pencil right there. I have a couple of choices down here. I have some brushes. This is just a plain round brush and if I take my finger and drag across here, I can remove the texture. Let's undo that. The next one is a softer brush. I can do like that. We're undo it. If I click the Settings button down here, I can change the size of that brush. So now I have a larger brush, which tends to be a little bit smoother, smoother transition. Let's undo those. And then I have a radial brush. If I click and drag my finger out, then I have a nice, very, very smooth transition from the inside to the outside. That's not what I want here. And the final one, which is the one that I do want is my Graduated Filter. So I'm going to tap on the bottom and I'm going to start dragging my finger upwards. And what I'm doing is I'm removing The longer I extend this smoother that transition is, and I'm going to remove this from the bottom of the photo. And then I'm going to click Save. Now I can't really see that missing corner so much anymore because I've removed it from most of the bottom of this image. If I feel that needs anymore masking, I can click on here and go to the soft brush as well. Make sure that I remove more of that. Don't want to get too, too close to the horizon. There, there we go. And I'm gonna click Save. You can use a combination of just using your finger back and forth to make small brushstrokes. Or you can use that graduated or radial filter depending on the image that you want. Flattening it basically means that it's going to take the image on the right, which is the texture, and the image on the left, which is your original photo. And it's going to make them one single photo and allow you to add another texture. So let's see what that looks like. So let's flatten. Now the little box on the bottom right is available. So I'm going to click on that and go back to photos. And let's just add something fairly dramatic for some grungy look. Let's pick this one right here. There we go. Now I can change the blending mode for this particular texture. That's what it actually looks like. Oh, wait a minute, look at that. It actually remembers the direction that that other texture was facing. I'm going to have to click on these little crosshairs up here and make sure that I turn this around the way that I want it to face and click Save. Now I can come back to my blending modes and change things around. The reason I wanted to show you this is not so that I could really add another texture here. But what you can do is add any other file that is a PNG file, meaning it has a transparent background because if something has a transparent background, say your logo. If you've got a logo that you'd like to watermark your images width. You can have that saved as a PNG file onto your tablet or your phone and you can just upload it as a texture in this image blender app. And then you can put your logo on and you can move it around just like we did the regular texture. You can change the opacity of a change the Blending Mode of it, just like we did with a regular texture, It's no different. So I'm going to remove that. What I have in here, not really a logo, but I have got a PNG file and it's just this black and white flower right here. So as I said, any other PNG file, it works exactly the same way. In any case, I had what I wanted you to understand here is that when you put one image on top of another and you get those two photos to communicate with each other. The possibilities are endless, the creativity is endless. And it can be so much fun and such an inspiration to bring different textures and different elements from different photos like this and blend them together to create something that is truly unique. That it's not just another beach photo, but it has something added to it. Something a little bit extra special than just, hey, that's a cool sunset. Who doesn't love a cool sunset? I do. But that's what I want you to get out of this class. It's not just, Hey, here's how you throw some things together with Image Blender and these other apps. But I want you to start thinking creatively about blending different aspects of images together, adding different effects like rain and snow and beams of light and things like that, that can come in the form of a texture photo to enhance your image and really make it special and uniquely yours. Okay, let's, let's cancel that. Yeah, I'm sure I want to cancel that. Remove that one. I like the streaky lights from that texture, but not the gigantic alien flower there. Here we go. And we're gonna save this to photos. And we are good to go. After that. It will ask you if you want to start over on a clean project. Of course I do. Let's start over with something else. I'm gonna leave that to you for your project, for this portion of the class, what I want you to do is download Image Blender, find a photo either on your phone, your tablet, your computer, and move it over to your mobile device. Something that maybe has some open sky like this one I think would be easiest to start working with if you've never worked with textures before. This makes it a little easier to see, but choose whatever image you want. Find a texture to your liking, but do remember to find something that brings out the best aspects of your photo and go for that mood or feeling that you're trying to convey with the final combination of your texture and your image. Submit them in the class projects and I look forward to seeing your results. Thanks. 6. Use Mextures to Take Your Images to the Next Level: Welcome back. For our next lesson, we are going to use the app called mixtures, and you can see it here in my photo editing album on my iPad. I will give you a little caveat about this one. It will not work in the horizontal format, so you'll have to turn your iPad to the portrait position in order to use mixtures. Alright, so I'm gonna open that app. Down here we have some options. The Inspire button will just take you to the internet and show you a bunch of examples that other people have done. You can manage your formulas if you have created any. I have not created any formulas yet. The screen will change and just rotate through all these pretty examples. You can go to the store to get some add-ons. Most of the time I just come in here and I don't click on camera because I don't take the image with the app. I use this as part of my post-processing. So as far as overall workflow is concerned, before I bring an image into one of these apps to apply a texture to it. I have already gone through an app similar to something like Snapseed. Or you can just use the native editing app on your, on your iPad or Android device or your phone, and make some simple edits. So I will get the overall adjustments for brightness and contrast, saturation and vibrance and all of these things before I even get in here. So essentially what I bring into these apps is what I would consider a final version of my image. And I just want to take it a step further. I'm going to open up my tutorials album here. And I'm going to choose this tree. Have included this in the class resources if you would like to follow along. But you are more than welcome to use your own image. Now when I click Use, it, literally wants to turn everything into a square. So I'm just going to click on, on cropped so that it will maintain the proportions. The original portions of my image on the bottom are two main choices. On the left you have textures and on the right you have formulas. Formulas is actually a really good way when you are starting out and you really don't know where you want to take your image. What kind of an overall look am I going for? So you can come in here and essentially just try these out. So there are different moods. Now this is wonderful because remember what I talked about earlier about creating a mood. You can click on these and you have a couple of dozen different formulas with very, very different looks. Okay, so the one I'm going to pick here, and that's just because I've been in here before and played with this, I'm gonna pick dusky rows. And I like what it did to the overall color. So I think that the desaturating of it, of the sky in particular, almost turning the tree itself into somewhat of a black and white. I like that look. I can tell here that there are several different textures are filters wherever you want to call them applied to this image because it is a formula. I'm going to click on the checkbox. It says formula added. Now when I get in here, I can scroll back and forth and I can see each of the textures that have been applied to create this overall look. Now I'm noticing that the top of this image is a little bit darker than I would like. And that is because of, and I can tell by looking in here that there is a neutral density texture applied to this image that I'm going to want to remove because I don't want that effect. I'm going to click on that particular layer. If I turn it off by clicking on the eye, I can see now that that is the source of that darkening of the top portion of the image. So I actually don't want that. So I'm gonna turn that off by clicking on the X. And it will ask me if I want to delete this particular layer. Yes, I do. Okay. Now I'm looking at these and going, you know what, that mulberry one that is currently in the overlay blending mode. Let's click on that one. I can see that the opacity in this formula was set very, very low and that is that little bar on the right-hand side. I'm going to drag that all the way up so I can see what that texture looks like. And that is what I'm going for. I want to add some grit and some grunge to this sky. In particular, if I click on the checkbox, what it's gonna do is it's going to show me all of the other textures that are available along with Mulberry. So if I decide that I want to switch from Mulberry to another one here, I can do that. Let's try decay. That's interesting. How about concrete jungle? I kinda like that too. This is gonna be hard. I like mulberry and I like concrete jungle. But I think I'm going to stick with mulberry, okay? Here, you have some options with this particular texture. Alright, so I've already increased the opacity, which I can bring back down if I want, but I really liked that look, so I'm gonna keep it all the way at 100%. On the left here, I have the ability to rotate this texture. So right here, if I click these double arrows, it will rotate it. So if there's a certain portion of the texture, do you think would look better? Off to the left side, are off to the right side, top or bottom. You can rotate this. I always kinda come in here and just see what the effect is because certain areas will lighten, certain areas will darken. I think I actually like it like that. Again, just below that, you can select and change the blending mode for that particular mulberry texture. Because right now I think it was set to overlay. Yes, it is. And I can change it to multiply and that will darken it. Normal. And again, normal. Blending mode means that all we're seeing is the texture itself. So I'm going to raise that backup to a 100%. And the normal blending mode will always just kind of show you what the texture looks like all by itself, the lightened blending mode. Now I'm going to stick with overlay. I like that. Click that checkbox. Go back to my layers by tapping on the layer button, which is right next to the blending modes. It brings me right back to my layers. So let's look at the soil texture. And again, that is, has got a low opacity. A lot of these do they have low opacities? I do want to see the full effect. And I do want to maybe look at what else is available along with the soil. So maybe twilight would work better, or vintage, vintage favorite, that one. If you tap the little heart on any of these, it becomes a favorite. I'm thinking I like Sky Earth a little bit better than vintage, so I'm going to favorite that one as well because I might come back to it at some point. All right, let's go back to our layers. Alright, so this is what we have. We've got waterfront, mulberry, vintage, winter, dusk and sky earth. And this is a formula that we have altered ourselves. Now what if I want even more grunge to this? If I want to add something more, I have to click this little plus button and it will bring me back to the texture is not the formulas but the textures. Because if I click on Formulas, if I had the ability to click on a formula here, it would completely demolished everything that I just did. And basically start over. I'm gonna go to my grunge, which has 15 textures available in it. And again, mulberry is in there. And so let's look and see if I want something else, a 100% opacity so we can see what's really going on. And I think I'm going to add concrete jungle to that. But maybe lower the opacity a little bit. Let's change the blending mode first. Let's go to blending modes. It's nice to see in the normal blending mode what these textures actually looked like all by themselves. When you are learning about textures and you don't really understand how a certain look was created coming in here and actually seeing the base texture that was used without any of the blending mode changes, without seeing the image behind it will allow you to understand and be able in the future to come back and say, oh, these types of textures will give a grunge look to my sky and you can look for those online when you decide to, you know, maybe purchased some textures and keep them for yourself. Software, it looks kinda nice. Let's lower the opacity on that. It adds just a, just a little bit extra. Will do that. Soft light looks good. All right, over next to the plus button so we can just keep adding, adding, adding if you want, whatever it is that look that you're going for that overall feel. So right next to that is a bunch of sliders, so I'm gonna click on those. And here we have the ability to maybe change this to a black and white. I'm turning that on and suddenly I have a black and white That's interesting. I can change the exposure, contrast, temperature, tint. All of these things are fairly self-explanatory. The temperature is going to make it either warmer or cooler. Depending on which direction you go, the tint is either going to make it more green or more magenta. So that's more magenta. And to the left is more green. Pressing that little button on the left will just reset it. Saturation. You can increase the colors a little bit kind of like that because I want the grunt, but maybe bringing back a little bit of color will help. Okay, I'm just going to tap that X to get out of my adjustments. And that is pretty much the look that I had intended to create when I brought this image in here, I was thinking about the light, the background, the textures in the tree that I wanted to kind of enhance with a little bit of contrast. And some of the textures that I chose added some contrast to that. But I really wanted to beef up that sky with a lot of grunge. And I believe I was successful here. So I'm going to share this image by tapping the Share button in the top right corner. Now if I really love this look, I can save this formula given a name and it will always be here for me to apply again. And just because I've saved it as a formula, again, it doesn't mean that it has to be used in that exact form. I can come into that formula and make changes just like I did to this one and add more textures, different moods, things like that. You can share it or you can save it as well. So I would just save this image. And it goes right to my camera roll and it will be there when I get out of mixtures. Excellent, go Grunge. So I will see you in the next video. 7. Distressed FX Plus for Amazing Results: Hey everyone, welcome back. The last app we're going to use today to enhance our images is called distressed fx plus. Now this app comes with a nice little practice image if you just want to start playing, but we're gonna go ahead and use one of our own photos. I'm going to click the camera button in the upper-left. I'm going to choose choose picture. I'm not going to use the camera to take a photo. I already have my pictures. And I'm gonna choose this flower image again, if you would like to follow along, you're more than welcome to it. You do not have to use this image along the bottom before we click the checkbox there to bring it in, you have the option to rotate, crop it to a certain aspect ratio. But I'm just going to click the checkbox. On the top row here we have what are considered gels. So a lot of these, we'll just kinda change the overall color tones of your photo before we even get into all of that, Let's talk for a moment about what we want this image to say when we're finally done with it. We have here an iPhone shot that I took of a magnolia that is in bloom. So unlike the last image that we had, a tree that was something that was dead, this is all about life and opening up and springtime. So when I look at an image like this and I want to enhance it with a texture. That's the type of texture that I'm going to look for. I'm gonna look for things that maybe seem like springtime or brighten it, or maybe even perhaps give it a high key look because we've got a white subject here. As I go through all of these gels and textures here, that is what I'm going to keep in the back of my mind is what is that final look that I'm going for that overall field that I want to create. Alright, so let's just try a few of these and see what they look like. And a lot of them are gonna, like I said, change the overall color. That one I definitely don't like it's just very matte looking. Sweet gums got a little bit of texture in it, along with the colors. You can see when I click on these, that each one is currently saying multiply. And you might come in here and see a few that say overlay. And that's probably because I have been in there and I've changed them before. If I do want to change those blending modes on any of these, Let's see what shirt looks like. I'm going to click on it again. I get a few choices, not a ton, but a few. So if I wanted to change it to overlay, That's very pretty. And actually that has a nice brightening effect. Hard light is a little bit too much color. Soft light is kinda nice. Let's go back to multiply. I'm just going to keep going here. Bokeh effect not appropriate for this image. Very grunge looking. I don't want that for this one. I wanted it for the previous one based on the subject matter, but not on this one. When you get to the very end of the row, you have a button that says switch packs, so I can switch my gel packs from the original overlays that were included in this app and others that I have either purchased the complete collection with or I have added on one by one. So I have a bunch of Bokeh. Let's check what the lights are when I click on that other one. See this one doesn't have as many in it, but it's got some interesting looks. So again, scrolling through, thinking about what it is that I want to convey about this image. Those are not the things that I want to convey. So I'm gonna click on switch pack. And the heavens has a whole bunch of sky and you don't have to actually click on it to see what it has. If you want to take a peek, click that little I, and it will show you on a single image the different gels that are available within that pack, so you don't actually have to apply it. So right now I'm gonna go back to none and I'm gonna go to the bottom row. And I'm going to start clicking on these textures instead. Now those are the original textures. Again, if I go all the way to the end and click on switch pack those original textures that came with distressed FX. Vintage painterly grunge. Again, I don't want a grunge look, so I'm not gonna go for that here. I'm going to choose box of colors. Let's see that one. Because I really just want to change the overall color look of this. Add a little splash of color without too much texture. That's very watercolor looking. Let's see. If we change it to soft light or something. Not like an a. Okay, So I'm gonna look at ROS and wine because I actually liked those pink tones. And so when I click on that, if I switch it to overlay, look at how that added just a touch of color, smudge, texture, but it really just brighten that whole image up. I really liked that. That is the type of look I'm going for. So I'm going to leave that on overlay. And I'm going to close that out. Just a quick note. The button on the left that is kind of an eye dropper is a blurring button. If I pinch and extend my fingers out like this, I can widen that up a little bit, but that's not something that I really use very much. If ever. The eraser is going to allow us to remove part of this texture from the image. And I'm actually going to do that with another photo. But birds are going to do exactly that. They're gonna add birds do photo which is completely inappropriate on this one. I'm not gonna do that either. Let's look at over the sliders over here. Here is on the bottom, the saturation. So if I really liked the color, but I thought maybe a little bit more of it than that, but I don't. And this is the overall brightness. But again, I like the brightening that it did. I'm going to leave it there. The top one is sharpening. I liked the very soft look here, So don't want to do too much with that. And on the right is contrast, and I just don't want to add too much contrast. I'm just going to reset this with that little balance on the bottom left there. Before I click the X there, I'm going to take the slider on the bottom. If I drag it all the way to the left, this is my opacity for the texture itself. So if the texture is a little too heavy handed, I can drag this to the left and remove it. Right next to that is the ability to rotate it. So say I wanted that pink. That's mostly showing up on the top that I wanted to show it up on the bottom. So here's on the right side, here's on the bottom, left side, and top. And I like it on the top. Now I'm going to click the X and I'm out of that. Excellent. All right, so I'm going to add one of the gels here and I can switch while I'm in this pack picker here, between the textures, the birds, and the Jill's. So I'm gonna click on atmospheric light. Kinda like like that. Maybe not too much. Let's see, overlay, hard, lightweight too much. That looks really good in Soft Light. But I think it's adding a little bit too much like rose color to the stamen itself. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna click on the eraser, and I'm going to use a low opacity. This is the opacity of the brush. This is a size of the brush. And I'm just kinda, kinda come in here and remove that last effect from right there. That's better. Excellent. Say I wanted to add a different texture. I've got all these textures down here. But what if I wanted to add another one on top of this one? If I go to switch my pack and I pick something else, it's going to remove this texture and basically start over. And I don't want to do that. What I have to do is I have to press and hold. And it will ask me if I want to flatten this image and it can't be undone. If I flatten it. I'm going to go ahead and do that. Flattened this image. And then I'm going to switch my pack. And let's just go back to our original textures here. And I can just kind of see if I wanted to add something else on top of it. Say I wanted to add something like that. What I wanted to lower the opacity of it. These are the types of things that you can do here. Absolutely fantastic. So if I click Undo, It's going to undo everything after the point where I flatten the photo. If I click Reset, I'm just back here. So that little bit that I did here with soft light and then I went in and lower the opacity. It didn't do a lot. I actually want to remove that effect anyway, because again, it did a little too much. I actually just really like this image. The way to that is I'm going to save it. I'm going to click on that button in the top right corner. And I have a few options here. I can just download it, save it directly to my iPad. I can email it and I can click on war where it allows me to bring it into another app if it's compatible, not all of them are. Save it to your files, things like that. So I'm going to just save this to my iPad. And it gives you the option to share instantly on Instagram. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm just going to click Dismiss one more real quick because I want to show you something very particular. I'm going to add a dramatic texture here and say I like what this texture does in overlay mode. And I like with the olive does, but I don't really want it to apply to the bug itself. I just wanted to kind of on the background a little bit. So we'll put that in, put that in soft light mode. I'm going to click on that eraser again. And show you that a little bit more slowly this time. So again, the slider on the left is the opacity. And this is what I do anytime that I have, is specifically an animal or a person, or some sort of area of concentration that I really don't want the texture to obscure too much recover up. And so I'll make myself a nice big soft brush. If I do it at 100% opacity, you can kind of see that the change is very abrupt. Especially if I come in here, it's just too abrupt. So I'm gonna switch this tiny little button here back to a plus and bring that back in. And bring that back in. This is how you can kind of go back and forth, back and forth between removing and adding. So I'm going to click on Remove again. And I'm gonna make sure that the hand tool is picked. The little 3D box that you have on the top there is whether or not your image was taken in portrait mode. If you have a tablet or a phone that is capable of shooting in portrait mode, word automatically softens the background. You can actually use that here and it'll make a nicer selection for you. But I'm gonna use a low opacity and just kinda come in here and remove the effect from the bugs themselves. There we go. Maybe a little bit of it up in here, a little too much green going on because I used a low opacity brush. If I tap and drag a little bit, it removes a little bit. If I do it again, It's a little bit more and a little bit more. So that is a wonderful way to kind of build up the effect of removing or adding the texture depending on whether or not you have that minus that plus. Okay, so I'm gonna click the checkbox and I am good to go. Now if I switch to a different texture here. So let's switch to this one. The mask that I created stays, but if I click on that erase button again and press on it, you can kind of see where the previous strokes were. It maintained that mask. I'm going to click the X box because I don't need that. If you need to zoom in on a certain portion of your image, these four little arrows right here will allow you to do that. That's the only way that I can pinch and drag my image around to look at specific areas just to make sure that everything is okay. I cannot do that while I'm in this view, unfortunately. But they do give you this wonderful Zoom tool. So you can go in there and do exactly that. Makes sure that you don't have any harsh transitions between where I'm asked in and masked out and go back to none on both of these. Now, if I were seriously working on this image, I'd probably want something relatively soft. And so let me show you real quick how to import your own texture. Now, I've supplied you guys with a couple of samples that you can play with. But I'm going to click on the Custom button. Down here on the right. Go to my album and my textures. I'm going to pick one that's kind of soft with some sprinklers to it. I believe I gave you this one. Hard light. Soft light. That looks nice. Soft light. I'm going to leave it there. And I'm actually going to remove a little bit of it from these guys right here. I'm gonna click okay with that. Then I might add just to change the overall tone a little bit about ME. And maybe a little soft light. With that soft light tends to be less heavy-handed when it applies the texture to the image. I'm going to click okay with that, but it kinda brightened up that top portion a little bit too much. So I'm gonna do the mask and I'm going to remove it from up there. There we go. I'm gonna, if I click on my sliders here, I have the ability to rotate that top one, which is the gel into rotate that bottom one, which is my texture. Just because the texture was brought in here at a certain direction and angle doesn't mean you can't flip it around. Like I might add just a little bit more contrast. I'm good. I think I'm gonna add a little bit of a vignette effect. In order to add something else, I have to press and hold and flatten. Let's look for some stuff with some vignettes. I think it's gonna end up being a gel. Go with the original overlays. And Lily here has a little bit of a vignette. And then I come in here and take my sliders and just lower the opacity a little bit. So just has a very slight effect. Excellent. And I'm done, and I will save that and dismiss that. And we're good to go with an image like this because it has an actual living creature in it. That definitely came into my calculations as to what I wanted to do with this image. I wanted to make sure that I didn't cover up those bugs too terribly much. So I had to make use of some of the masking tools that are available in here so that I don't essentially remove the main subject there by use of a texture. And I wanted to find one that had complimentary colors and tones to enhance the image, not just change it completely, although you can do that if that is your goal. I hope between these three different apps that I've given you some great ideas to build upon from here on out. Thanks again. 8. Conclusion: Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed that class. I just want you to remember that we have our cell phones with us all the time. We're using them to document our lives with still images and video. I mean, how many of you have taken a selfie with your cell phone? We're out enjoying nature more and more. We're filling our phones with thousands of images. I mean, even our kids are getting into photography with these amazing devices. If I have helped you become a little bit more creative with this class, with what you do to those images after you've taken them, then I feel like I have done my job. I want to thank you for being here. Don't forget to submit those projects. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Above all, have fun with this process and I'll see you next time.