Using your smartphone as an artistic aid

This is aimed at people who have a smartphone.  

Familiarising yourself with your smartphone camera

If you want to do similar a similar exercise, it can be done on an iPad, iPhone, tablet or digital camera. I use both the cellphone and digital camera - and the images from the digital camera I work over on the computer. There are lots of apps that do this but the best value of the professional ones has to be Photoshop Elements, a sort of smaller and cheaper brother to Photoshop.

I have a Chinese-brand Android-powered smartphone (Apple’s IOS operating system is pretty similar) with most of the extras you’d expect. It takes good pictures when all I want it to do is record a scene, sunset, friends together, the exterior of a particularly good bottle of wine or - and I use it frequently for this - something that is available in a shop but I’m hesitating buying. Maybe cheaper elsewhere? 

It does NOT produce such good pictures when it zooms in. They get brittle. I won’t go into the details of why this happens with a cellphone and not with a camera because its pretty complex tekkie stuff about pixels and grouping. Suffice it to say that the more pixels you use to take a photo, the better the image will be when you enlarge part of it. You've got a choice of three: low, standard and high.

So, if you are going out purposely with your cellphone to snap a flower, the dog or whatever I’d set the quality to HIGH. You can always change this back later.  

You'd do this by opening the CAMERA symbol for taking a photo on your screen, and then going into the last setting on the top right (three horizontal lines), then tapping the SETTINGS option on top left. This opens up a mass of options for setting the camera. Head for the PICTURE QUALITY and select HIGH if you are going to be using the photo for artistic purposes.

 

I did an experiment with LOW, STANDARD and HIGH on my cellphone and couldn’t really see the difference between 840kb, 1.5mb (1500kb) and the 4.5mb (4500kb) image - at least certainly before enlarging it. 

However, it did enlarge selected smaller parts of the image better when I used the 4.5mb image.

Cellphone photography is amazingly liberating. it is not like photography in the old days when I started taking pictures. Back in the 60s I counted every frame of the 36-exposure before taking it to be developed and prayed that most of those valuable images would come out. Some did, some didn’t.

Today, you can snap away, and save, till your heart’s content and your data card is full.

Just another observation: other better-heeled members of my family have the latest models of the iPhone and their photos are brilliant even when just doing a regular on the spur of the moment snap, and are also excellent using the zoom facility. 

You get what you pay for!

But this article is not about producing gallery quality images; we’re researching the use of the photo on a cellphone as an AID to our artwork.

So, you’ve probably seen the manipulation programme on your cellphone and it is naturally based on the above professional computer apps - but how many folk make use of it? 

This is what I’m going to try and encourage you to use on a regular basis.

Artistic help as you work

Thus you are working on your painting, drawing or collage. It is going fairly well but …

Use your cellphone/iPad/Smartpad/camera

Take a snap and then study it. It won’t be an exact replica of your work but it is a great aid. Remember you get very used to seeing your own image on paper, or wherever, so confronted by a photograph you tend to appraise it differently.

Is it well balanced? If you hold it up to a mirror, you'll get an idea. But arms get tired. So, take a snap.

Look at your photo. Perhaps it could be a little more impressive if you moved the subject over and dumped some of the left/right/sky/foreground.

Should it be a bit darker?  Perhaps a little more daring with colour. Maybe a bit looser.

You’ve got a photo in your collection but don’t know what to do

Another example taken a while ago was really colourful. I snapped away and then filed away. But I remembered it was colourful and wondered what I could extract to make a painting or drawing. 

Thoughts: What do I want to do with it? What lead me to think it could be a painting? Again it is the colour. But it is also the variety of fish in the foreground. Yes, strangely enough, I’ve had some success with fish paintings!

OR...

You want to do something but don’t know what will make a picture

For this blog, I do something flowery. 

Not much choice when you are locked down but I found a jolly set of flowers on the Thorn of Christ to illustrate how to use your smartphone.

Thoughts: what do I want to do with it? What is it that lead me to this plant (apart from little else around)? Do I want the pot? (No!)

In this case I like the contrast of the green and pink petals. I guess that is what intrigues me.

I’d like to make it: Smaller, stronger, punchier and why not even more colourful? It might even work a greetings card for a friend. Who knows.

SO THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT.

Open up your photos to be found in GALLERY.  

And you'll find your latest photos in PHOTOS or if you are already grouping them, in one of your ALBUMS. 

If you've just been taking photos in the garden or wherever, most likely they will be listed under the PHOTOS and then under the CAMERA option - as mine are.

Tap on the photo under your CAMERA option.

Now tap on your chosen image and the full photo, manipulation and extras, come up under the photo.

You know the first option: it's the button to forward or send on the image as it is to WhatsApp, FBook, Messenger, Mail etc etc.

Head for the second option (the square with a pencil sticking out to the top right): it is an image for EDIT. Tap it.

This is what you'll find.

We're going to check out the CROP option which also has a ROTATE option behind it.

You've probably found that but it is a useful button to remember.

We'll start with a crop, so tap the option.

A grid comes up over the image and you adjust it with your finger as you fancy to find the shape and area you want to save.

I get rid of the pot and save just the flowers by tapping the TICK button in the bottom right.

Then maybe I'll have a look at a smaller area and I move the picture with my finger around into the shaded selected area.

Tap the TICK button in the bottom right when you are happy.

If you want to go on and do other manipulations, then leave it at that.

If that is the end of your adjustments, then tap the SAVE button at top right to ensure you save a copy. 

Luckily it is always another copy that is saved so you can find the original should you wish to.

So what else can you do? 

Let's find the ADJUST option (three horizontal lines with vertical tags on them). It is not visible on opening among the the choice of manipulation options but by sliding the options off to the left, you'll find it right after DOODLE and TEXT and you'll see the three little sliders representing the ADJUST option.

You can explore the interim options of sticker, doodle and text another time.

Now tap the ADJUST option. You will then have five different options.

BRIGHTNESS   SHARPEN   CONTRAST   SATURATION   VIGNETTE

We'll test out SATURATION. 

When you tap any of these options, a slider bar above the options appear to decrease or increase the option, in this case, saturation. Let's go gaudy.

Now you get the hang of it, you can play around with the colours.

Try out the various options and save if you like them. If you don't care for them, just tap the X option and it will go back a step. 

Look at the photo of your current painting that needs a bit of TLC  

So maybe the work would benefit by being a bit darker, or a bit more contrasty.
Use the contrast option to see and slide it left or right to note the changes.

Or maybe you should be a bit bolder with the colour. 

Slide the saturation button and see what happens. 

Might it have been fun in just monochrome? 
Slide the SATURATION and see your image in monochrome. 

TIP: if you want to do a monochrome work of, say, a portrait, this is where you start. You manipulate the photo of your painting subject and slide the SATURATION right back to the left and you have a monochrome image. 
It makes it so much easier to see your relative values.

Try those buttons out and save your options.

Then look at the saved results and make your decisions.

After you have mastered these buttons, you can then play around with the FILTER button where preset options are applied to your photo. And explore the other options such as drawing over, writing on your image. 

So I went back to my fishmonger. 

Much as the lad on the right is sweet and has a nice coloured T-shirt - that matches his fly swatter - he is only half there. I’ll eliminate him! 

The photo is busy. Let’s simplify the area to treat. So we should seek potential shapes and areas that make a picture. 

So I tried out various bits of the photo to see what made a picture.

 

 I like this square one above but are there enough fish in it?!? 

It would probably be better as a vertical painting - as the photo cropping below shows. And then I started on the fish!

   

So of course I pushed the colour under ADJUST's option SATURATION, and I also used the triangle for SHARPEN as I was taking small bits of the photo. The last one is not much but I think the diagonal fish might be worked up into something.

Your camera or cellphone will open up so many possibilities that you might not have considered!

Don’t forget to save the good images!

Happy snapping and enjoy the fun.