iPhoneography

Guest Reviewer: Narin Chalabi

Narin is an ex-pupil of mine from Notredame High. She is now a university student, a Tumblr and Deviant Art contributor, a Tweeter, an animator and an excellent photographer. She has been featured on the blog previously and continues to impress me with her talents.

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iPhone photography or ‘iPhoneography’ has recently become a very popular trend amongst iPhone users. Ever since the iPhone app Instagram came out, it has been a huge hit and the number of people signing up is growing every day. However, it doesn’t just end at Instagram, there are some amazing photo editing apps out there which are just as good as Photoshop (not really).

I’ll be sharing some of the apps I use the most and what I think of them. For the non-free apps I have tried my best to give you as much information about them as possible. I hope this will be useful for you.

Snapseed; (£2.99) ★★★★☆

Snapseed in my opinion is one of the best apps on the iPhone for editing photos. There are many types of different filters in it which allows you to fully bring out the colours of a dull photo. Whenever I edit my photos on the iPhone I always have to use Snapseed first in order to bring out the colours of the photo and make it more attractive to the eye. The price may be a little high, however… be on the lookout as they sometimes do promotions and they make the app free!

This app allows you to:

* Automatically adjust the photo

* Selectively adjust the photo

* Tune image: allows you to change the; Brightness, Ambience, contrast, saturation and white balance

* Straighten

* Crop (free form crop or adjusted sized crops)

* Details: like sharpening your photo or changing its structure (I guess it means bringing out the shapes more)

* Black and white: you can adjust the brightness, contrast and grain. There are also adjusted black and white filters too for you to use.

* Vintage: Lets you change; Brightness, saturation, texture strength, centre size and style strength

* Drama: makes the photo more dramatic

* Grudge

* Centre focus

* Frames

* Tilt and shift

LensLight: (£0.69) ★★★☆☆

I think this app is rather fun to use; you can create some amazing photos with it, especially sunsets where the sun isn’t in the photo. This app lets you add overlays of different light effects which a normal camera would create. It’s got well over 20 different overlays of these effects and it can be fun to play around with at times. The only problem I found with it is that it crashed a lot for me when I first installed it.

Above you’ll find examples of some of the stuff it can do: (the first two photos are the same photo, but just edited differently.)

Juxtaposer: (£1.99) ★★★★☆

With Juxtaposer you can create some of the most amazing photos on iPhone. It can take several tries until you become a pro at it, however this app, to me, is amazing and has a feature on it that Photoshop doesn’t and that’s an “unerase” button. It’s so useful I think the creators of Photoshop could learn something from this app.

This app is mostly used for photomanipulation photos via your iphone. You can also create your own stamps. For example, say you only wanted the moon from the photo so you would cut round the moon and just save the moon as a stamp and it will forever be saved in your app and you can use the stamp whenever you want. It’s very useful. Here are some photos I’ve created with it:

For this photo I cut out one of the eyes in a photo I had taken previously and created a butterfly with it. To create a white background, you need to upload the white background first, then add which ever stamp/photo you want to it.

Combining two photos together to create a prettier photo.

This is a good example which portrays the idea of the stamp tool. First I added the moon in, and then I cut out the birds in this photo and used them as stamps several times to create this composition. (This photo’s been processed through a filter afterward, but just using it to show an example)

FX Photostudio : (£0.69) ★★★★☆

This app is somewhat the whole package if you want to add filters, do a colour splash or adjust your photo a little bit. It has well over 80 filters in it which you can use and all of them are rather good. What I really like about this app is that you can select yourself where the filter effect takes place as you can erase and un-erase some parts of the filter. However you cannot adjust the position of the filter.

An example of its colour splash.

Blurring the background.

Using its symmetry effect.

Water effect overlay with Rainbow filter.

Free apps

After having a look at the free apps, I’ve come to the realisation that the apps that are free to buy change all the time. Many of the editing apps which get released are promotions then later they are priced again. Therefore it’s very difficult to tell you the free apps as it could change by the time you read this and have a look.

However, apps like Pixlr-o-matic, Squaready, Water my Photo and Phototreats have been free for a long time, so they must be free apps and not free promo apps.

Therefore, for free apps, you will always need to have a look out on the free section of “photo & video” category as you never know what might be there. Apps such as Snapseed and add ons for Hipstamatic have been offered free on a limited basis. It is worth checking this section regularly and thanks to this I’ve helped save myself some money.

Halloween Is Coming On

As a little Halloween treat, to get us all into the spirit of things, I have re-edited the original Halloween Special Art Clast episode to be a little speedier and more to the point. Have a watch and get inspired.

It’s Not Always A Success…

I have had a few successes, working with/for artists and musicians that most would consider famous or have achieved the right amount of respectable attention, though it’s not always been pure sailing. For the small amount of projects I could brag about and get your attention, there have also been a multitude of designs that haven’t gone exactly as planned. I thought I should feature some of these below, to show you that you should never give up. You will be ignored and rejected a lot (well… I am), but sometimes you’ll get it just right and art is all about the little wins.

Above is a never used cover for the indie band ‘Language of Flowers‘. I spent a long time creating the right feel. The root system lettering alone took around three days, though Shelf Life Records ended up going with this atrocity. A lot of the time, good designs will be pushed out just to feature a picture of the artist, it’s always a safe move for the record company, but it’s incredibly boring. Below you’ll see a completely rejected redesign of Vic Rattlehead for Megadeth. It was developed for a competition ran on Deviant Art, getting into the shortlisted stage I was able to get a comment from Dave Mustaine (singer, lead guitarist) stating that ‘it was incredibly cute but way off for the branding of the band’ [paraphrased, I can't remember the exact comment, but that's the jist of it].

The cover below was for Fiona Apple‘s 2005 comeback album. She had been incredibly big, especially with her single ‘Fast as you can’, then took some time out to re-invent herself. Her ‘Extraordinary Machine’ album was very quirky, slightly Tom Waits, very unusual. I thought this modern cover would have been a great addition to her lyrical intention. Focusing on computers, analog machines, humanity and her. I worked hard to get an image of Fiona onto the cover and then Epic Records went all left field and chose this?

I really liked the logo below for the band ‘armaeda‘. I decided that it would be interesting to make a typeface out of the exact same character. If you look closely, all the letters are the same character, rotated and faded. Unfortunately for me, the band quit before they had even begun and the logo was never used. The same thing happened to ‘Son of Shrimp‘ below. I am usually quite proud of the work I pass on, so it’s a shame to never see it getting used.

The NIN (Nine Inch Nails) cover below was for the album ‘With Teeth’. There had been a call out on 99designs and I thought I’d give it a go. I don’t really like this cover at all, though I feel it is very NIN. They ended up going with this idea, which is a lot better than mine…

I am a huge fan of Karl Pilkington and have followed him since the first podcast with Gervais and Merchant.  I had emailed them a few times and got some replies, so when I heard that he was getting a book together I thought I’d try my luck at sending them this idea (not finished, it’s just a low res. thumbnail) for the book cover. I never got a reply and they ended up going with some photo of Karl sitting down… so safe, so boring.

So there you go. Just some of the tries and fails that I have experienced in my long and torturous career. I’m slightly depressed now… What was my point again? Oh yeah… Don’t give up… Get frustrated and go demented over rejections and endless workloads… like me.

Artwork Invoice

Becoming A Professional Artist / Designer – Part 2

As promised, please find an Artist’s/ Designer’s invoice available for download below from the ‘box’ (bottom of the right hand column). This invoice will let you see how invoices are laid out, to help you create your own, or you can download it, print it out and fill in the details. It is completely free for use. I can’t take any responsibility for the success of your work, your job or the passing of funds, though this should help those who are just starting out, or those that never knew how to invoice properly. As with all exchanges of money, you will need to clear such funds with the tax office and it will be likely that you will have to pay tax on the amount if you earn more than £5000. There will also be National Insurance Contributions to be made. More information on Self Employment and contributions can be found here. This always sounds a bit complicated, but it needn’t be. Most employers will automatically take contributions and tax from you before you get paid, so you don’t need to claim again or you’ll earn so little when you start off that you’ll be exempt from tax. It helps to know how to stay on the right side of the law though.

You should always clear with you client about what they are purchasing. Are they getting complete rights to the work for use and reproduction or are they buying a one-off piece that cannot be tampered with. As with all good invoices, I have left a rights and reproduction line for you to delete as appropriate, though this should not be considered as a contract, that may also be needed to protect your agreement.

I hope this helps some of you out there. Good luck and if you do use it, successfully or unsuccessfully, let me know.

The Best Thing To Happen Since The Printing Press

Forget looking at tiny dotty pictures of artwork in books and low resolution images from a Google Image search. Click over and have a look at Google Art Project. It lets you zoom right into the painting to see the tiny cracks and lets you walk around any museum in the world that’s actually worth paying a huge plane fair to go visit. Amazing. I wish they had this stuff when I was a kid…

http://www.googleartproject.com/

Conifer For Excellence

Miss Ledingham at Ladywell Learning Centre has created this amazing mural on the wall of the school’s social area. I haven’t seen a piece of promotion for the Curriculum for Excellence like this ever before. It’s better than anything I’ve seen even coming from the board itself. Truly inspirational.

Psykopaint

Pyskopaint is a great flash website that lets you upload your own photos and paint over the top of them in many different artist styles such as Munch, Renoir and Monet. I haven’t had much time with it yet, though the introduction and the samples have already blown me away. There’s also great tutorial videos to train you up too. If you give it a try and produce anything good from it, I’d love to see your efforts.

http://www.psykopaint.com/

SLF 2010

I attended the Scottish Learning Festival 2010 a few weeks ago to see the Lochgilphead ‘Living Without Prejudice’ book and video on display. There was an amazing range of artwork on display from lots of schools in the Argyll & Bute Council area and the work was very inspirational.

While there, I also had the chance to check out the new Art Bus that will soon be touring around schools showing off it’s new collection of amalgamated sculpture, wall art and writing. It really was an interesting space to spend time in, much better than previous years.

Details and contact info on the project ‘Impossible Nation’ travelling Art Bus project, can be found here: http://www.travellinggallery.com/

Modern Art Fair

It’s always tough as a teacher, competing with television, cinema and gaming. It seems that a lot of male pupils’ spare time revolves around Modern Warfare 2, even though most are below the recommended certificated age. I thought I’d try and put together a quick poster to attract the attention of some of these pupils.

By combining the point of view from MW2 and Roy Lichenstien’s ‘Whaam’, I was trying to show the similarities between art and gaming. I think that people forget that art inspired photography, photography inspired film and film inspired gaming.

The poster is free to download in ‘the box’ (bottom of right hand column).

Young Brits At Art 2010

I am hosting a few of the Young Brits at Art workshops this year and hoping to match Jessica C‘s success last year. I will be holding workshops scattered over Scotland including Kelvingrove Museum/Glasgow. The workshops will consist of various different types of mixed media, painting, photography, film, audio and sculpture.

Of course, you don’t need me to enter, you can enter as a school, a class, a pupil or a young individual. Details of the competition can be found here:

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/fairer-britain/youth-projects/young-brits-at-art/