ColorSplash turns ordinary images into arty, interesting and…well, cool, photographs.

It’s also fun and easy to use. ‘Tart up’ an image from your photo collection or take one on the camera phone and edit it.

The creators of ColorSplash say:

ColorSplash lets you quickly and easily give photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white, while keeping your chosen details in color.

In a nutshell

Take a photo and load it into ColorSplash. The image is automatically converted to B&W. Using the native abilities of the iPhone you can zoom in and out with the pinch and flick technique and then wipe your finger over a part of the image to restore the colour.

Step by step to photoart (the basics)

1. Open ColorSplash

2. Tap Start new session

3.  Choose your image

Here is a photo I took with my iPhone. On opening it in ColorSplash all the colour is wiped out.

4. Select the the Pan & Zoom tool (bottom left)

5. Flick to zoom in and find the place where you want to reinstate colour.

6. Select the Color tool and the wipe your finger over the section…just like magic, huh?

Keep switching between the Pan & Zoom and the Color tools until you are satisfied. Made a mistake while editing? Zoom into the section, select the Gray tool and wipe the color back out.

What next?

7. Save (and upload to Flickr so we can see your works of art. Also put a link in the comments below!)

Final image – fire hydrant in red

The ColorSplash tools revealed

This photography app has a ton of in-built tips. I will quickly list the tools here but you will find more in-depth assistance from the Help icon.

Top bar tools from left to right you have:

Menu – Help – Two View Modes – Brush selection – Undo (always handy)

Bottom bar tools from left to right:

Pan &Zoom – Color (select and wipe across image)  – Gray (select and wipe to remove colour)

Get the app

Go to the iTunes Apps Store to buy ColorSplash. It is well worth the money (AUD$2.49)

Related links

• Zack and Vince’s iPhone Reviews
• Flickr search for ColorSplash/iPhone tags

I’ve been experimenting with this effect for a while now and I have to say it’s well worth trying out.

A comment from elsamuko on a previous post led me to this Lomo Script. I was chuffed to note that elsamuko updated the colours in the script based on my post.

Try it yourself

Simply follow the instructions on the GIMP Plugin Registry page and then watch your image transform before your very eyes. Have some fun with the effects you get.

You can use red, blue, green or neutral color effects and even add a vignette. If you wish, tweak the effects further by selecting the layers and adjusting them manually.

I usually try out a couple of variations before staying with one. It’s easy enough to “CTRL+Z” to undo the effect and then change the script settings to try again.

In the examples below only the color has been selected, nothing else. Look how dramatically you can change your pictures!

Green

Before Lomo

After Lomo

Blue – my fave

Before Lomo

After Lomo

Red

Before Lomo

After Lomo

If you have used the Lomo Script yourself – or decide to -  make sure to leave a link to your photo in the comments so we can check it out.

Check out this inspirational YouTube video by Chase Jarvis. Four invaluable high speed photography tips and some very cool stunts to boot.

» More at www.chasejarvis.com

Yet another reason to try out the special effects in iPhoto

Again, Cordelia has agreed to model for this installment in the iPhoto series of Tips and Tutorials. In this article we’ll make a cartoon effect using iPhoto.

I have a lot of photos of my cats and like many hobby photographers they can be very hit and miss. Sometimes, though, the expression caught in an otherwise ordinary photo makes deserves some post-processing.

The photo

Here we have a photo of my British Shorthair, Cordelia.

You can see that it’s quite grainy and blurry at the same time, very low light conditions and not exactly result I was hoping for. But the look on her face made me want to try to improve the photo somehow. So I decided to do a little more experimenting with iPhoto. In no time at all I had a cartoon/comic type of effect.

It’s all about smoothing the grain

The Reduce Noise option is the key to a cartoon effect. It smooths out all the grain in the image and almost gives it a paintbrush texture.

To start with I opened the Adjust settings and moved the Reduce Noise slider all the way to the right. Play around with this as you mightn’t need to always set this to maximum. In fact, I decreased it a little (to 89.0) as the effect made the image so smooth it became even more blurry. However, even with the decrease the eyes are still out of focus and as any eager amateur photographer knows – the eye have it.

So instead of decreasing the smooth paint-like effect even further I increased the Sharpness (to .71). Instantly the eyes stood out and the cartoon effect was still in tact. There was also more of an outline around the cat.

A few more minor adjustments

To polish up the final image I made a few more adjustments.

Levels and Contrast and Crop for an overall improvement. Saturation to bump up the color. The change I was most impressed with, possibly because I don’t use it very often, was the effect an adjustment to the Highlights setting produced.

Here is the Adjustments window showing the final settings.

And the final result. Voila!

If you have other iPhoto tips you’d like to share let us know in the comments. If you’d like to write a guest post about using iPhoto then get in touch with me via the Contact Form.

Create a cool green colour effect with curves

Cross processing is something I have started to experiment with. I find I’m drawn to many of these photos on Flickr - the effect can be quite stunning. I uploaded the final cross-processed result of this image to Flickr and it made Explore soon after.

Here we’ll focus on the green effect you can produce, although you can also adjust your settings for other hues, such as red.

It’s all about the curves

Cross processing can be a very simple GIMP edit if you set and save the RGB colour curves to your GIMP library. You can then re-use the setting again and again with other images. I have a few of these options saved in my GIMP library: one is a general curves adjustment; one boosts each RGB colour channel for retro effects; and now I have a green cross process setting.

Save the setting the first time you use it and it will then be available for future edits.

Auto-levels

In the image above I did a quick auto-levels adjustment Colors -> Levels -> Auto. I played around with the Hue-Saturation and Contrast options but decided to not to use these changes as there is quite a lot of contrast already. It will depend on your image if you need to boost the colour and contrast.

Save your curves setting

Now to the curves. Go to Layer -> Duplicate Layer – a handy option as you can simply delete the layer if you don’t like the results. The settings below are what I have come up with after reading a bagful of articles about cross processing.

Select Color -> Curves and change the individual RGB channels to the settings below:

Red setting

Green setting

Blue setting

Select Save and name your curves something useful, like Cross Processing – Green. You can use this setting for other images you cross process without having to change the RGB values each time. To access your saved files next time simply go to Color -> Curves -> Open.

Click OK and the image now looks like this:

You can also add an almost transparent fill layer of a lime green (to bring out more green) or a fushia (to bring out more red and blue). I’ve decided against a fill layer with this particular image.

Crop and you’re done

I cropped the balcony out of the image which brought more focus to the sky and those gorgeous sunbeams.

Et voila! Click the image to view a larger size in Flickr.

Related cross processing articles

• Brian Auer has a great tutorial on both green and red cross processing over at Epic Edits Weblog
• Check out the impressive results by Danny Ngan at Poo-Poo Platter

Other examples

It’s interesting to see the various RGB settings that are used and leads me to think I should make save a few more curves settings saved to my library.

Here are some other images I have cross processed – with varying degrees of success.

Do you have any handy cross processing tips?