iPhone Photography Tutorial – ‘How To Create An Abstracted Portrait Image’

The image above is the final image, the one that we are going to show you how to recreate.

I took the picture with the iPhone 4S’s native camera. I’ll sometimes use other apps to shoot but often forget and find that the native camera is very good, especially for a shot like this.

Open picture in Decim8. Decim8 is a very random program that can be hard to get used to. There is a “rand” button if you’d like to experiment with different effects. I use it so often that I generally pick which effect I’ll use based on the result I want to achieve. I used the Precog setting and hit the “Process” button, which generated a series of strange images ☺ until I got one I thought I could work with.

Open the image in Symmetry. This one will create a Siamese Twin effect. There is a circuitous arrow button. Click this one and random variations of symmetry will be produced. I chose the image above.

Open the image in Snapseed and crop square, using the button to constrain dimensions 1:1

I used the Vintage filter in Snapseed to add some texture and age . I increased the saturation, image strength, and center size by swiping up and down on the image and then swiping sideways to increase each feature individually.

I wanted some blur in the image so In Snapseed, clicked on Center Focus. I Moved the focus area to the left of the image and increase blur to 100%, making the focus on the right eye.

Snapseed Grunge. There are some beautiful textures in Snapseed, though I find some of them too dark. I increased the center size by a bit and I used the random feature (double arrow keys) until I found one that was pleasing to my eye.

Here is that awesome final image again, quite an improvement from the original 😉

Snapseed
Symmetry
Decim8