Luxembourg City...

Camera: Canon EOS40D

Lens: 17-85mm EF USM Kit Lens

Apps used for processing (as far as I remember):

Squaready - my first step was it to cut a 1:1 piece out of my original photo so I used Squaready, which is a neat little app meant to prepare photos to use with Instagram and it's clones.

PerfectClr - to correct the heavily underexposed photo which had not been corrected in Canon's Digital Photo Professional before. I discovered PerfectClr by chance, after reading an article about the upcoming improvements of the iPhone's Camera App and Pictures App in iOS5. I downloaded it and I am very satisfied with the possibilities PerfectClr offers to enhance any photo. 

SimplyHDR - to create a HDR picture of my boring looking photo. I did two versions, one with the Smooth slider set to full left and one with it set to full right. HDR style used was Brown.

Blender - to blend the smooth picture with the detailed picture in Normal mode to reduce the effect by 50%. After saving that result I loaded it again in Blender together with the original color picture to blend it 50/50 in Normal mode again to give it back some color. The result looked already very nice but still too boring to me.

DynamicLight - to add a slight 25% effect of its beautiful Orton filter. I wanted a soft glow in my picture to the Orton is very useful for that. However one must be very careful with DynamicLight because the negative side effect of it's usually nice enhancements of a picture is the resulting grainy sky. 

PerfectlClr - I was loading my photo in PerfectlyClr again to lighten up the shadows. To do this I used the setting FixDark which is just perfect for serving that purpose. The resulting image was very clear in its shadows but the negative side effect was the sky which was now a bit too bright.

Blender again - to blend the brightened up picture with the previous darker one. At last I was happy with my picture. I now went on to try several apps and settings to enhance it further, among them being the Instagram apps like the original Instagram, Instaplus, Instacam and ClassicINSTA, but I wasn't much satisfied with the results so I tried qbro. The latter is really a nice app to create 1:1 size pictures and it comes with a bunch of very useful frames and filters. I created a version of my picture with the filter Burnt, which looked really great but what I disliked about it was the very heavy grain in the dark brown vignette.

Camera+ - finally gave me what I was looking for. I applied the Hipster filter with a 25% setting and used the Old-Timey border where I added the title of my picture to.

A+Signature - for the copyright watermark.

In my times before the iPhone I used to carry my DSLR around all the time. The old town of Luxembourg-City is a tourist magnet because of it's old architecture, the Palace of the Grand-Duke and the Cathedral Notre-Dame and I love to photograph the buildings too. I made the photo that served for creating this iPhoneography picture on a dull day in March 2008 from across the valley of the Petrusse but like I had no tripod with me and my DSLR equipment not being the best I end up with mostly underexposed photos. But I did not delete them again because I always think that even an underexposed photo may be useful some day. As I stumbled over the neat little app PerfectlyClr I used such an underexposed photo to test its capabilites. The result is what you see here as the main picture of my blog entry. Before I forget - below is the original photo that I made on March 8, 2008: