Photo Effects and Filters
In this project, I intend to demonstrate the abilities and results of various consumer-targeted photo filters and effects applications available in the IOS and OSX App Stores as well as filters available in Adobe Photoshop. I do not pass judgment on whether such applications result in 'art'. However, for this exercise, I am applying these applications to my work and using them to the best of my ability to create results that I find compelling and useful. In most cases, these will be photographs-straight-to-filter. Any extra-app manipulation will be stated in the description.
My Son Contemplates Homework
Yet another Prisma filter, this one called Breakfast. The title says it all.
Saturday Lunch Cleanup
Another Prisma filter called Urban. From the name and the example this filter seems aimed at cityscapes. I like it's cubists leanings. I'll be taking this and some other interesting results into other apps to experiment with.
Mopping Sucks
This is from an app called Prisma, the filter is called Roy for it's Roy Lichtenstein effect. Its success is highly dependent upon good lighting and high contrast. Prisma is always adding new filters, each with their own idiosyncrasies and levels of success. They occasionally have sponsored filters like the ones that periodically appear in Snapchat.
My only wish was more control over contrast, tint, and such.
Karen On The Sea
A photo I took of my wife and put through the Adobe PaintCan app. PaintCan has some presets you can use to get some pretty impressive effects, but what I really dig are the manual brushes. There are six of them with direct options of size and opacity. Moreover, the size option isn't dependent on pixel resolution, but on zoom; effectively bringing in a wide variety of brush sizes that enable the user to more fine-tune parts of the image as desired.
To the best of my knowledge, there are only two layers possible: one with the original image, and the paint-effects layer. These paint-effects can be hard-altered with 100% opacity or layered with varying degrees of opacity. There are two types of Erasers. I haven't really figured out how they work and using either of them produced alarming results.
In this 'painting' the brushstrokes really are all mine, but the actual color that shows up is dependent on both the image that is being brushed over, the attack of the stroke, and where the stroke started. It can be infuriatingly finicky but I found that it gave me more of a sense of accomplishment and a good percentage of what I call the happy accident factor.