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Color Lake – iPhone Photography Tutorial – Adding A New Dimension To A Street Scene

2012-08-11 / 9 Comments

Color Lake is a really excellent iPhone photography effects app. It allows you to add water reflections, snow and rain to image but not only that, you can also adjust the wave sizes and height, rain strength, and snow size. You can take screenshots directly from the main screen and there is full retina display support.

In this tutorial I show you how to create atmosphere and nostalgia in a relatively normal street scene. Without the use of Color Lake this would effect would not of been possible.

If you feel inspired after reading this tutorial and would like to try Color Lake for yourself, just go here. It retails for $1.99/£1.49.

 

Step 1

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This image was perfect for testing out Color Lake’s brand new rain filter update. Rather fitting that almost five years ago this street did have a major flood caused by a storm and freak downpour.

Step 2

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The base image was taken with the native camera and olloclip wide angle lens. It was a busy street so I had to wait quite a while for the traffic to clear. It was taken without the HDR. I did use the grid though to make sure I had the image straight. I converted it to black and white in Snapseed, adjusting the contrast to darken the sky and road. Then added some drama, I used the dark filter at 100%.

Step 3

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In Fotor I use the big aperture setting in micro to focus on just the one upper level. I used the highest blur setting.

Step 4

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Then in Image Blender I re-coloured the upper level, I used normal blending mode and erased just the section of the upper level so it popped.

Step 5

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For some reason the top of the image had a rainbow section appear so it had a quick touch up in Paint FX using the paint function, I used the color match tool to get the right shade.

Step 6

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In Color Lake I set the horizon at street level to create a flooded street scene and adjusted the rain intensity till I was happy with the balance.

 

Step 7

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This is the flooded street scene in Color Lake.

Final Image

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Here is my stunning final image, complete with lashing rain and flooded streets. I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial, please comment below. I was inspired by Color Lake to produce this awesome scene and hope you will try it too.

Mel Harrison is an Australian digital artist, iPhone photographer and writer. Her work has been shown in exhibitions around the world including the LA-MAF. She has been honoured with Artist of the Day and Artist of the Month at www.iphoneart.com. Mel is active in the IPhoneography community and is part of our sister site staff team at www.mobitog.com. You can follow Mel's work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mahoganyturtle/ and her work is a available to purchase via http://iprints.iphoneart.com/artist_studio/MahoganyTurtle As a Columnist for theappwhisperer.com, Mel will focus on digital art and collage images. Her column will be called APPart and she will be incorporating a different 'mainstream' editing app each week and will hopefully inspire you to try your hand at some APPart of your own.

9 Comments