Mobile Photography Tip Of The Day – Number 28
Welcome to another brand new section from your favourite mobile photography website and one of the most popular in the world. Today, we’re publishing our 28th Mobile Photography/Art Tip Of The Day to our brand new section of the site.
Every day we will publish a short quick tip to help you with your mobile photography, this may be related to editing your image, capturing your image, printing your image, all manner of things, across the complete photographic and art mobile genre – we’ll be featuring great mobile street photography tips, great blending tips, great cloning tips, we will cover it all from some of the greatest mobile photographers and artists in the world.
We’ll also have a widget in our right hand column, displaying the Tip of The Day every day, just click on that and you will be taken to our tip of the Day archive.
We are delighted to publish our twenty eighth Tip Of The Day today with a very key one from Janine Graf. Janine is one of our wonderful columnists and runs iSights, if you haven’t visited that, then we strongly suggest you do so, it’s really fabulous, go here. We have also featured Janine in many of our Flickr Group Showcases and we have published many interviews and photo app articles with her too – please go here to view her archive.
Over to you Janine (forward by Joanne Carter)…
Opacity to the Rescue!
Hi everybody! My tip of the day is about opacity. Oftentimes when I create composite images I’m placing an object to fit a scene that shows some distance in the background. When a composition is such, it really helps make the image more believable if you adjust the opacity of your top layer. Let me show you an example so you know exactly what I’m talking about . . .
Above is an image called “Turbine Troubles” in its not quite finished state. See how sharp and solid the rhino and her balloons are? Looks pretty awful, doesn’t it? She’s so solid in fact that she looks as though she should be more in the foreground and not off in the distance in relation to the turbines. However, if she were more in the foreground, she’d be larger in scale. This is where opacity saves the day!
You can do this in any layering app that allows for opacity adjustment, such as Blender or Superimpose. I create all my composite images in Juxtaposer and it’s such a pain that they don’t allow for opacity adjustment; really hoping they add that feature one day, so in the meantime I use Superimpose for this purpose. All you need to do is in three easy steps: 1) upload your base image into your preferred layering app with opacity functionality, 2) add your saved composited image on top and bring it fully in alignment with the base, then 3) lower the opacity to the level that matches the objects in the distance.
Viola, a more believable composition!
Janine Graf
Janine’s mobile photography has been exhibited in art galleries across the United States and in Europe, has been featured on various websites and in publication. She is currently a proud member of the traveling iPad photography exhibit called “Light Impressions” along with 40 very talented mobile photographers. In publishing news, Janine was honored and delighted to have participated in an upcoming book about creating surreal digital photography. This book is set to be released in the spring of 2013 by Ilex Press. Janine is a mobile photographer who enjoys belly dancing, bacon cheeseburgers, cappuccinos, the smell of old books, slapstick comedy, the color orange and movies about gladiators. Since discovering mobile photography in the early fall of 2010, Janine has set aside her professional DSLR and desktop editing programs in favor of the iPhone and its myriad of wonderful editing apps. In regards to subject matter, she tends to gravitate towards subjects that allow for a whimsy feeling or vibe; she likes to have fun!
2 Comments
Robert Lancaster
Thanks for the great tip Janine! 🙂
This is something I have really struggled with in the past.
David
“I do believe in flying rhinos. I do believe in flying rhinos. I do believe. I do believe,” he says clicking his heels together three times….
Great tip, Janine! Really!!!