Angels On My Wall...

Camera App: regular iPhone4 camera app with HDR switched on.


Additional Apps used for post processing:


Well, I've got to to confess that I did not keep records on the exact steps I took to make this picture of two metal cast angels hanging on our kitchen wall. But included was:


SimplyHDR - to create an enhanced HDR picture from the original HDR photo.
Artista Sketch - for a pencil drawing of that picture.
Blender - again one of my most important apps plaid a major role in this creation. I used it a lot to blend different versions of my picture until I was finally satisfied with the result.
Super Retro - for an effect called Middle Earth. This gave the photo a burned look with nice colors.
PhotoStudio - for a burned paper effect.
FilterStorm - for many steps... First one was to apply a radiant gradient filter, starting from the middle and going to the far right, as far as the left wing of the male angel goes. This gave a very nice effect. To do this I imported the version I saved before applying the burned paper effect to the layer with the burned paper effect I opened in FilterStorm. After applying the gradient filter I imported the version before the burned paper effect again. This time I applied a mask over the angels to cut them from the streaky gradient effect.
PicGrunger - for the Burlap texture.
SP PhotoTrade - for the beautiful Steam Punk frame and Journal texture. I must say I'm very happy about the will of the app developers to listen to us users because as the app came out it only supported low res savings. The argument of the developers was that processing on the iPhone would take too much time for high res pictures and they feared the main steam of customers wouldn't be willing to wait that long. Luckily I could convince them to include high res saving with a warning that this may take some time to process. But I wonder what they really understand as "high resolution" because still the picture wasn't saved in full iP4 resolution of 2592x1936. I was only 2300somethingXanything which I found out by checking the picture size with the neat little app called PhotoSize.
Iris - to resample the downsized picture back to 2592x1936 pixels. Although other apps may do the same job I still prefer Iris for this because there is no loss of quality. I recently did some pics for friends of mine who provided them in 640x480 and boosted the final version to 2592x1936 which looked brilliant then. So Iris is first choice for boosting resolution.
FilterStorm again - this time for erasing the Journal texture from the angels. To do this I first created two different versions in SP PhotoTrade, one with the frame an no texture, using the version before PicGrunger, and one with the frame+Journal texture using the PicGrunger version for it. I then imported one version to the other as a second exposure in FilterStorm to erase the Journal texture from the angels only. 
SnapSeed - to change white balance to a blueish look. The original angels have the look of oxidized bronze which I wanted to get back. The blueish tint was only the first step to achive this.
Blender - as I said I used it again and again to blend a lot. I don't remember the different steps in detail but I sure used it to blend the blue tinted version with the normal version.
FilterStorm - again I used it to erase the blueish angels from the brown tinted version so the angels stood out from the background. But I still wasn't satisfied because the angles looked too blue.
Blender - I was then blending the blueish angel version with the normal version again and I finally got want I was looking for.
A+Signature - for the copyright watermark...
After transferring my pictures to my laptop computer I saw on the big screen that it looked much too pale for my taste so I used Camera+ to enhance Vibrancy by 46%. 


I was big fun to make this picture. Hope anybody else likes it too. Below is the original photo I started from to make it. The angels are hanging on our kitchen wall. I photographed them using the iPhone camera app and the kitchen light only. No tripod either.

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