HOW TO CREATE MOODY IMAGE - Device : iPhone 4s - Featured Apps : Snapseed, Rainy Daze - Topics covered : Tuning, selective

adjustment, adding rain effect 1. A pic speaks a thousand words. And a moody pic always delivers strong emotion / drama that draws more attentions than the usual pic. We do not need an advance big size sensor camera to create the moody image, nor go to the exotic place to create one. If we have an iphone and some apps, we could create a moody image easily. 2. In this tutorial, I would like to share the important things to create a moody image. Started from when we need to go out for taking the basic image, where, and what the elements/objects that we should get into the frame. I will also share the apps I usually use in the editing process. 3. What kind of elements needed for creating a moody image? Personally, I would like to describe that the moody image at least must have the elements as follows : - Dark sky - Rain / fog - Great contrast ( to create the silhouette ) - Umbrella ( will add more drama! ) 4. Tutorial - Taking photos Go out taking photos after the rain, or when in drizzling afternoon. Go to the place that quite open and has adequate sun light and clear background. Wait for the object passing by. I love if the object is like a lady holding an umbrella or a walking man that facing down to the road. In this tutorial, I use a figure ( actually a man ) holding an umbrella while walking at the open plaza.

A. Open the photo in snapseed, this app has always been the first app when I am editing my photos. - Cropping is the first step to remove unnecessary element. Make your photos as simple as possible ( not much elements ). - Apply 'drama' filter to bring the contrast and the texture of the sky. Dial down the strength to 20 - Apply 'grunge' filter to add the texture ( style 400, texture 11, contrast 0, saturation 0 )

- Apply 'tune image' to make the city background not too obvious ( foggy ) by increasing the ambience to +40 and decreasing the contrast to -45. - Apply 'selective adjustment'. Tap at the silhouette area and decrease the brightness to -100 This step will make the silhouette stand out from the background. - Saved.

B. Open the photo in 'Rainy Daze' The app will automatically give you the default effect. Usually I pretty satisfied with the default. You may adjust all the parameter according to your preference. - In this photo, in the 'adjust' section, I dial down the contrast, darken scene, vignette, and saturation. - In the 'rain' section, I decrease the rain thickness, rain strength, and slide the direction to the left. - Saved.

C. Bring back to 'snapseed' again - Apply 'automatic' to adjust the contrast. In this case, I dial down the contrast to 38 - Apply 'vintage' filter to add more texture and vignette. Choose style 7 with style strength at 0, center size +83, texture strength +27, saturation +0, and brightness +2 - Saved.

C. Open in PS express to sharpen the image (+5) and reduce the noise (+5) DONE! Final image :

End of tutorial, thanks for the attention

Apps Used:

 Artstudio Snapseed Phonto Blender PicFX Process: 1. Girl with the umbrella // I searched from the Internet 2. The wind storm // I also searched from the Internet 3. The sea // Shot with Native Camera of my iPhone4 4. I deleted the background of the girl image in Artstudio, I used eraser tool. I have to be patient in this part. 5. Blended the storm with the sea. I still used Artsudio. 6. Merged down all layer and export to the camera roll. 7. Opened it in Snapseed to adjust the tones (selective adjust), add center focus (potrait2) and adjust sharpness (+30%) 8. Imported to Blender App to blend the birds (multiply blend mode) and #mextures (screen blend mode +50% capacity) And then I opened Phonto to add #typography After that brought it to PicFX to add light (bokeh 3 +40% capacity) 9. Done

Tutorial: Line abstraction I got lot of great feedback on my series of line edits I did recently. Weather it was here, on IG, EyeEm, tumblr or Flickr: A lot of people asked me how to do it. I think this is a good point to make a short tutorial: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Apps used: Diptic, Decim8, Snapseed The first thing you have to do is to decide which photo is suitable for making this kind of edit. You need something you can cut off at any point, preferably somewhere in the middle part. The above two pics where cut in the middle area. I cut off a lake beneath the mountain and the train tracks beneath the city. As soon as you have chosen your pic you can begin. For the tutorial I've chosen this shot of some illuminated orchids shot with hipstamatic.

First step is to use Diptic to cut off the photo. Choose the 4th preset in the classic section. It's the one with the horizontal separation. Choose the upper one and place your pic just as you'd like it to be cut. For the lower part choose some pic that contains the main color of your pic. In my case this was obviously black, which makes this step easy. No borders needed here, just turn them off. Mine looks like this at this point:

After this we need to prepare our pic for Decim8. We need to turn the pic once against the clock because Decim8 can only make lines from left to right. For turning I quickly used the iPhone's Photo app, but you can use whatever you want. After you turned the pic you can open it in Decim8. We only need the BAMRIRR filter here. Apply it until you're happy with the result. Mine looks like this:

Now you can turn your pic back to make your preferred tweaks. I think that the Snapseed Retrolux filters fit quite good here so that's what I did. I opened the pic in Snapseed and applied some Retrolux and other enhancements. Please don't ask me what I did exactly because I don't remember exactly. Here's what my final result looks like: