From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Combine painting effects with photos - iPhone Tutorial

From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Combine painting effects with photos

- [Instructor] There are a lot of really interesting photo apps that are available for our mobile devices as well as a lot of very cool graphics, sketching, and painting apps. Hi, I'm Sean, and in this episode of Mobile Photography Weekly, I want to share some ideas and techniques for blending the results of graphics and painting apps back into the original source photos to create some new effects. So the one important thing to understand about the philosophy of this approach is that it really is less about the sketching and painting apps, as it is about the photo apps where you can blend them together using layers, blend modes, and masks. So you can pretty much get by with any sketching, graphics, or painting app that allows you to create the effect that you want. The real magic takes place when you can blend it together in a photo app. I'm going to start out in an app called ToonPAINT and I'm just going to go and get a photograph of an old boat, and right off the bat, ToonPAINT will convert the image to an inkline interpretation, just black, white, and some tones of gray. If I wanted to edit that, I can tap on size here and modify some of the line widths and lengths if I wanted to. But overall, I kind of like the way that this looks. So I think I'm just going to leave it set that way. And I'm going to tap on the paint button in the upper right. So normally in ToonPAINT, this is where you would apply paint, but I'm not going to do that. I want this black and white approach. So I'm just going to go and tap Share. And I'll save that out to my photo gallery. Now even though it says high res output, this is not outputting it at the same size as the original photo. But for my purposes, it will be fine. Let's go over here to Snapseed. So Snapseed is available for both iOS and Android. It's a really great app. Going to open up the original version of the boat picture. I'll tap the pencil button. Go down to the filters and tap double exposure. I'm going to tap the little plus picture button down at the bottom there, and I'll go get that line drawing that I just created in ToonPAINT. Now normally in Snapseed's double exposure, this is the part where you would tap on the little swatch book icon down here in the middle and try out some different blend modes to see how this looks in blending the line drawing with the actual color photo. And you know, you might find something here that looks pretty cool. I'm going to leave it set to either the default here or the lightened one. Actually I think I'm going to go with default because it doesn't look quite so bright and harsh. And I'm just going to tap okay to apply that. Now what I'm going to do is take advantage of the fact that I can go back and view what's called the edit stack in Snapseed. I'll tap on this little button at the top right that has two layers and a backwards arrow. I'll choose view edits. And then I'll tap on double exposure. Now I'll tap on the little paintbrush button. So what this is going to allow me to do is paint in the look of that line drawing. So what I'm going to do is just brush over here and bring that in. So you can see how that's coming in. Let me just use a two-finger gesture to come up here a little bit closer. I like this little demarcation line here in the bluffs, this kind of darker version. And we're just going to get a little bit of the prow of the boat. And some of the sand on the side here and the distant hillside. Now if you feel like you've gone over too close, like you have done a little bit too much by the prow of the boat, I'm going to tap the down arrow until I get to zero. Zoom up a little bit closer and just come in here and paint that away. And now I'm painting with the actual photograph again. So there we go. That looks pretty good for now. I like the way that that looks. So now I have this nice interpretation of the image. It's a blend of that line drawing and a blend of the color photo. So I'm going to save that out here. Let me back out of the edit stack screen and just save that out to the photo gallery. So now I'm going to show you a similar approach using a different app. We go into this app called Waterlogue, and this is a really simply app. You don't have to do anything except choose a preset and it just builds the painting for you. It's pretty cool. I'm going to get this shot of the street car and you can see how the Waterlogue app is just starting to build up the painting. You can actually learn a lot about how you know how to put a painting together by watching how that build is accomplished. So again, no real settings here other than these presets you can choose. I've already saved this out to my camera roll and I've already started a version of this in Snapseed. So let's actually go back out to Snapseed and dive right in there and take a look at that file. So one cool thing about Snapseed is that you can save files as a copy and all the edits will be saved so you can access them again. So here's the version where I've already done the double exposure technique in Snapseed, and we have the watercolor painting line on top of the original photograph of the streetcar. So I'll go up and tap that layer and backwards arrow button to get to my edit stack, choose view edits, and there's the double exposure state. I'll tap on that brush and now I want to reveal the photograph in the foreground of this image here. So I'm going to tap the downward arrow button until I get to zero 'cause I want to see 0% of the painting. And if I start brushing over here, we get this effect of the streetcar either emerging from a painting or we have to enter the painting in order to get onto this magical streetcar. So something like that. There we have it. So the same basic technique that I used with the line art drawing of the boat, now combining a watercolor painting with the real photograph in Snapseed. So I have one other example to show you that was done in a different app. I've got that over on my iPad. So let's look over at that. So for this image that I used Photoshop Mix, again that's an app that's available for both iOS and Android. I call this Into the Painting and the whole idea behind this is that my daughter here is jumping across this little walkway to go into the tunnel there and the idea is that she's sort of leaping into the painting and actually becoming a part of the painting as she jumps. And you can see that blend of the real photograph and the painting which was a watercolor interpretation done in the Waterlogue app. So if I double tap on the top layer, it turns that off. You can see what the original photograph looks like. Bring that back on, and then I double tap on the bottom layer. Here you can see how I've masked the painting layer so that only some of it is showing and only some of the painting is going over her leg and her dress and her arm there. So the reason I used Photoshop Mix for this image is that it just gave me a lot more control in terms of how I masked the layers and put them together, plus I'm able to keep these as layers and the masking is nondestructive so I can always go back and change it and modify if I needed to. If you're interested in learning more about compositing images together in Adobe Photoshop Mix, we have an earlier episode of Mobile Photography Weekly that covers that very topic. So this is just a quick look at a few ideas for how you can combine the effects from sketching or painting apps with the original source photograph. As long as you have an app that offers double exposure or layering capability as well as simple layer masking, it's easy to blend the two together.

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