Courtyard Lamp Post Tutorial

Courtyard Lamp Post Tutorial by Mike H.

Apps used:

Camera+ ($ 1.99)

Dynamic Light ($ 0.99)

Old Photo Pro (free)

Color Splash ($ 0.99)

Lens Light ($ 0.99)

Touch Retouch ($ 0.99)

Superimpose ($ 0.99)

Took about an hour and a half to complete, but I always try different things and make it up as I go along.

Step 1) I took this in the courtyard of the Pharmacy Museum in the French Quarter of New Orleans using camera+ on the iPhone 4. A pretty cool little place if anyone finds themselves in the area, pop in for a minute and check it out.

Step 2) Cropped it to square and added the black and white filter turned all the way up. You can use most any app for this but I prefer camera+.

Step 3) Open up Dynamic Light and use the “overcooked HDR” filter and adjust that until you get it looking like you want, no need to worry about the color wheel. I used the settings on the right side of the photo above. You gotta be careful with Dynamic Light or else your photo can come out looking to cooked.

So you’re left with something like this.

Step 4) Next I went into Old Photo Pro to add the color for the ground and inside the lights glass. I adjusted the contrast and brightness a small amount, as well as turning up the tone a bit. But you don’t want it to be to dark, that can always be added later.

And you’re left with this.

Step 5) I used color splash to get rid of the color from everything except the glass in the lamp. Simple, effective.

Step 6) Open up Lens Light and use the “sun beam” effect. try and position it in the center of the colored glass part from step 5, turn the brightness up a bit. Since you can’t enlarge on Lens Light, its easiest for me to see what I’m doing on the small screen if I use two fingers, the effect you choose will kinda hover in between them and you can have better control of exactly where it goes.

Now the problem with using Lens Light to do this is the little balls of light and rays that come from the sun, like on the lower left side of the lamp post in the photo above. So we got to lose those before moving forward.

Step 7) Go back into color splash and carefully remove the color from area around that side of the post where the beams are, like in the photo above.

So it should look a little like this.

Step 8 ) It’s probably not a big deal to some people, but I’m kinda OCD about my edit’s, so I opened up Touch Retouch to remove that small little bright piece of light in between the fence that didn’t even out from color splash. Yea, yea I know…

So it kinda looks like this.

Step 9) Ok, now we’re gonna open up Superimpose and take the photos from steps 4 and 8 and layer them on top of each other. Use the one from step 4 (Old Photo Pro) in the foreground so that you can make adjustments to the saturation and all that, and then align them up. Using the masking tool (brush) remove all but the golden color on the ground, then go around some of the small parts making shadows and whatever. Adjust the contrast, brightness and saturation so that is gets nice and deep looking.

Step 10) You’re done! unless you want to go and adjust the tone in any app since the last step only adjusted the color on the ground. I didn’t.

Thanks for stopping through and reading up on these ideas of mine, if there’s any questions just ask!