Use your photos as color filters

- [Instructor] Hey everybody, Sean Duggan here. And it's time once again for another installment of Mobile Photography Weekly. This week, we're going to take a look at a very simple app that lets you transfer the color and tonal qualities from one photo onto another, essentially enabling you to use your own photos as color filters on other images. So the app in question is called Color Thief and it's available for iOS. I've searched for an app that does something similar to this on Android, but I have come up empty-handed. I'm not saying that such an app doesn't exist either as a standalone app or perhaps as a feature within an app, but, if it does, I haven't found it yet.

Alright, let's fire up Color Thief and check it out. So as apps go, this is one of the most basic and simple ones that I've run across. There's not much to it, because it only does one thing. The brightness, color, and contrast qualities from the image on the bottom in the filmstrip are transferred to the destination image up above. Tap on the load image icon on the top part to choose a photo that you want to apply colors to. We'll just get this one of Sedona, Arizona.

Then tap on that same load image icon in the filmstrip down below to go and choose a photo to use as the source or the color recipe. I'm going to get this one of the alleyway at night. Once you've chosen a color source image, you can scroll through the filmstrip down below to try out other images that were shot at the same time. So even if the photo was originally in an album, as this one was, it's not showing you the other shots in that album. But, instead, it's taking you out to the place in the camera roll where this image lives chronologically.

I think it would be nice to have the option to do both, because I tend to use this app with a selection of photos that I have placed in an album for just this purpose. So the top image is always displayed as a square crop here in the main view, but if you just tap on that, it will show you the full uncropped version of the image. I'll tap back to go into the main screen. So one thing to notice when you're using this is that it's not just applying the color scheme from the source image, but, also, the overall brightness and contrast qualities as well.

So this particular image here is somewhat bright, it's very saturated, very orange. All of that is translating up to the Sedona image. If I scroll over, this one's a little bit darker, not quite so saturated. And, finally, this third one, much darker, much less orange, and all of those qualities are being translated into that upper image. And the contrast qualities are going to translate as well. So each of these has really good contrast. But then this image here, in addition to being very low color saturation, has very low contrast.

So look at how the contrast in the clouds is changing as I choose that lower contrast source image. Alright, let's check out a couple of other images here and go and load up a new destination image. And we'll get this shot here of a rainy windshield. So this one actually looks pretty cool. I like the way those colors are working. But it does bring up something that I really wish that this app had, and that's the ability to apply brightness and contrast adjustments after I have applied that color matching.

Because while, overall, I like the way the color's looking here, I do feel that this image would benefit from being just a little bit brighter, and it would be nice to be able to do that right here in the app. As it is now, I have to save the image out and go take it into another app to apply those sorts of adjustments. Another feature I'd really like to have would be a basic strength or intensity slider so I could dial back the intensity of the color matching if I felt it would be appropriate. Alright, let's go get one final image to play with here. We'll get this shot of the forest.

Ooh, that looks kind of interesting. Very dramatic. Let's get a different image to put in there. We'll get this one of the red building. Now, what's interesting here about this one of the red building, and this one obviously doesn't look real at all, although it does look intriguing, is how the areas of color in the source image translate to that destination image. So if we look at the picture of the building, we can see that it's taking up a lot of this image here in terms of just the area of the photo. So a lot of that red area goes to the destination image.

But if I use the next photo of the building, it's taking up much less of the image area in this version and so less of that red is translated into the image. And that's looking a little bit better. Still not totally natural, but a little bit better. Finally, let's just check out the one right next to it here, this one of this doorway and gate. That is actually creating a really nice color scheme for this image of the forest, and I could definitely see using this same color scheme on other images of this forest that I took on the same day.

If you've ever wanted to use the color scheme in one of your images as a filter for other photos, then the Color Thief app may be something to look into. It's a fun way to create color treatments that's totally different from just clicking on the presets supplied by an app or by moving some sliders around. The app is also available in a desktop version for the Mac and you can find that in the app store.