“Lift Y’r Skinny Fists (Like Antennas to the Heavens)“, piece number 199 in my yearlong Daily App Experiment, captures Sutro Tower during the sunset. Although it has a very painted look, the piece was created with Camera+, Pic Smoother, and TrueHDR, with a few camera hacks along the way.
I started off with a flat surface to lay my iPhone 4 while I took a shot of Sutro Tower and the sunset. Although I wanted some glow, the light was really washing out the photo, so I used my finger to block the sun’s direct light (a handy trick if you can’t find any other objects in the shot to use).
I then ran the photo through Camera+ to crop it and mess around with some settings. I noticed the “Clarity” setting tended to give the photo a very unrealistic quality, rather than shy away from it, I saved the image with this setting, then opened the new image in Camera+ and re-ran Clarity. This really exaggerated the photos features in a very cartoonish way.
Once I was happy with my processing in Camera+, I used an app called Pic Smoother to help smooth the image out. It did a great job creating gradients for some parts, but left other areas kind of blotchy, which was a cool effect! Using Motionoto, I created an animated gif of the Clarity and smoothing in process (as the above animated gif).
