Top Five Photo Apps – Photo App Lounge by Vanessa Vox

©Vanessa Vox

This app detects faces, smooths and tones the skin. First of all you have to choose one of two suggestions. Afterwards the magic wand offers more presets which you can fine-tune with three sliders: Brightness/Smoothing/Filter opacity. Of course there are more functions in Beauty Booth but I never use them. (A hint: Never forget to push the eye’s glances to the right place or set it to 0 percent, this, I always do.)

I am always searching for something like an icon or archetype when I work on my self-portraits. That’s why I softened and reduced the detail information of the original pic. Especially the eye and the ear were important to me.

Now I’ve got an excellent foundation for the next step using different papers and vintage effects.

©Vanessa Vox

This app is one of my recent discoveries. I am actually fascinated by Classic Vintage with the beautiful old painting design when you open it. I enjoy the different papers, crackles, borders, and also the sepia tone.

The results are most of the time a little bit excessive but I am surprised how often I use them. But anyway you can always reduce the opacity with predetermined percents for a more delicate or poetic outcome.

I’ve chosen a textured paper and a crackle from the Nevada set, a sepia tone and 0 percent frames. The crackles give a fragile feeling. They break the surface. A symbol of transience and impending loss.

Classic Vintage has a comfortable preview function. You can continue to work or trying out other opacity percents without waiting for the rendering process. (You will see that a fine frame is walking through the picture which means that these parts were rendered in the background).

By the way: I once needed the customer mail service. And it is really fast, competent and friendly.

©Vanessa Vox

I have many favorite editing tools: Photo Toaster, Snapseed, Laminar Pro... But I really don’t know why: PhotoWizard is mostly my day to day app with all the standard tools in the classic form (curves, histogram, sharpness, shadows/highlights…). The effects section is also interesting: In this case I used the light leak option with reduced opacity in my self-portrait. And afterwards the sharpness option. Although this app is not supposed to give a painterly effect it did the job for me. Photo Wizard is really easy to use, fast and absolutely great. It has a full undo and redo function. Honestly I would not want to miss PhotoWizard.

©Vanessa Vox

I really love all the JixiPix apps! The processing is not the fastest, but I appreciate the possibility to fine-tune the chosen preset and to save the settings as my own preset. It speeds up my workflow next time! There are many fantastic styles in three groups (Vintage style/Antique Photo/Faded Time) and a lot of adjustment possibilities, including the choice of a new papers or frames. You will discover beautiful textures there and many inspiring combinations!

In this case the effect is not so obvious because I used it cautiously.

For fast blendings Image Blender is easy to use. But for complex compositings I prefer Superimpose. It is great for layering, adjusting, moving, masking etc. But only when you know how! Some of the functions are not very easy to find. So you have to get used to it.

I appreciate the magic wand as an alternative tool to the brush for the mask. A big advantage of this app is that you can save your mask in png.

Very welcome when you want to continue or rebuild your work another day. So your precisely and hard elaborated mask is not lost! I extracted my blackbird and the rose from their original backgrounds, moved them into my pic and chose a blending mode.

‘FEELING ONE’ – ©Vanessa Vox

A symbiotic feeling with nature. A close encounter of three creatures: Blackbird, rose and human being. A reminder to take care of our beautiful world. A witness of an ancient wisdom. We all belong together. We are all ONE which is symbolized by the pair of eyes.

Thanks to Joanne Carter and theappwhisperer.com for promoting all about iphoneography. Its a fascinating new experience.

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