Archive for Color

OSXcellence – Color Splash Studio Review

Colour or monochrome? Always a tough decision, but sometimes you don’t need to make that call – you can have a bit of both. Colour-popping – the retention of colour saturation in one part of a monochrome image – is becoming more and more popular.

Traditionally, the colour-pop effect could only be applied when using an image editor that supported multiple image layers, such as Photoshop Elements. Recently, a number of colour-popping specialist apps, particularly on touch-screen devices, have emerged, and the newest kid on the block is Color Splash Studio (at the reduced price of $1.99/£1.49 at the time of writing), from Macphun (makers of the previously reviewed FX Photo Studio).

Like FX Photo Studio, Color Splash Studio has a sleek interface, and is a swift operator. Drag & drop your image into the app, and you’re ready to start painting in colour. The opacity, size and hardness of the colour-painting brush can be adjusted, and painting is seemingly not as fiddly as in some apps – this may have something to do with the unobtrusive brush cursor. Additionally, both the painted and non-painted layer are adjustable in their colour, contrast, exposure etc. Via these adjustment sliders, it’s possible to make a subtle colour-pop effect, where non-painted areas are just slightly desaturated, rather than being converted to monochrome – producing an effect that is less “in-your-face.”

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Scenic Outlook – Autumn Approaches

If I’ve timed this right then Autumn/Fall should be upon us, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere. If summertime didn’t quite grab you enough to get you out of bed at ridiculous times of the day then autumn sure will. Due to the higher position of the Sun during the summer months the light is often very strong giving less definition to the landscape. In addition to this the grass will be green as will much of the leaves on trees and bushes, nice for us to look at but very often does not translate into photographs very well, this is because you end up with a mass of greenery in the picture and it becomes very difficult for us to see all the elements individually. During Autumn however, this all changes, with nearly all of the trees foliage gradually turning from greens through to yellow then to reds, and all at different rates.

This display of colours combined with the ever lowering position of the sun creates some of the most beautiful scenery nature has to offer. As I’ve said before, being out both during early morning and late evenings pays dividends for your photography as all these wonderful colours are brought to life, being more saturated with the warm glow of the rising/setting Sun. Read More→