There are days when I log on to Facebook, see hundreds of trendy looking pictures of food and cats and cute outfits, and feel as though Instagram has taken over the world. I wonder if my life will ever be cool/relevant enough to be documented online by a series of tiny ‘Instagrams’. I then cry into my sushi because I don’t own an iphone. Just kidding...
If you’re not familiar with Instagram, you’re probably an adult with a life, a baby who doesn’t use the computer or a hermit who lives in a cave. Either way, it’s fine, because it’s irrelevant. You don’t need to have instagram to make your photos look cool! You just need any two of these three things: Photoshop, a brain, the Internet.
I’ve picked out what I consider to be five of the coolest and most popular image effects and I’m going to hook you up with some tutorials so you can recreate these effects on your own images at home.
1. LOMO
You know it’s the lomo effect when: the colours in the photo appear oversaturated, there are extreme optical distortions, rainbow-colored subjects, off-kilter exposure, blurring and alternative film processing.
Photoshop tutorial video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v86faa0SPR4
If you don’t have Photoshop and you have no idea what you are doing, you can head here and they’ll do all the hard work for you: www.befunky.com
2. TILT SHIFT
You know it’s the tilt shift effect when: the main subject of the image is in focus and the rest is blurry. Sometimes’tilt shift’ specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene.
Photoshop tutorial: http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/photoshop-tutorial.php/
Again, befunky.com will do this for you if you are photoshopless/clueless.
3. POLAROID
You know it’s the vintage effect when: the colour tones lean towards either a blue or a red hue, or a cross-processed look. Vintage photos also have an element of noise or grain that can be achieved through textures, and also a certain amount of vignetting around the edges of the photo.
Photoshop tutorial: http://designinstruct.com/photography/vintage-photo-effect-photoshop/
Free: Befunky.com
5. SELECTIVE COLOURING
You know it’s the selective colour effect when: most of a photo is converted to black and white, but some parts are left in colour. For example, the eyes and the lips are in colour, against an otherwise black-and-white photograph.
Photoshop tutorial: http://www.busyinbrooklyn.com/selective-color-photoshop-tutorial-cs4/
Free: If you’re game, you can download Picasa and it'll do it for you with a few clicks of the mouse.
Just in case you didn't catch our recent newsletter, we're doing a new thing called 'customer of the month'. It's basically an excuse for us to show off our amazing customers and give them presents. Plus it's always interesting and inspiring to hear somebody's story.
Here's how it works:
Once you have a pixelpaint canvas that you think is pretty rad, you are eligible to submit an entry. Just send your submission via email (hello@pixelpaint.co.nz) or facebook and you're in the draw. All you need to do is fill out the questions listed down at the end of this post and send us an image - that's it!
Close to the end of each month we'll choose a submission at random, if you're chosen we'll sort you out with an A3 canvas voucher as a reward and make you pixelpaint famous, in other words, we'll publish your submission in our newsletter and on our blog for everyone to enjoy.
Our lovely customer of the month for July 2012 was Sarah Wright of Floyds Cafe in Island Bay, Wellington. Take a gander:
Tell us about the inspiration behind your canvases?
“Our style is a little rustic and funky, quite 'Kiwiana' and we loved the look and the colours of the old-school '20s and '30s advertising posters.”
What do you love most about them?
“They are different and really make a statement on our walls. People constantly want to buy them straight off the walls, but we'll never sell them!”
If you haven’t been to Floyds yet, you’re missing out! They’re serving up delicious home-grown style food with a fresh and local focus seven days a week. Head to 130 The Parade, Island Bay, Wellington to get your fix!
If this sounds like your cup of tea, please answer the questions below and send us a picture of your canvas/you and your canvas - just whatever you're comfortable with - via email or facebook. We'd love too hear from you!
Customer of the month questions questions:
What’s your name?
Where are you from?
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the art work you chose:
What is your favourite thing/favourite thing someone has said about your canvas:
What are you planning for your next canvas:
Don’t be shy ;)
In order to make sure your canvas print looks as stunning in real life as it does in your imagination, your image has to pass our image quality test before we let you proceed with your pixelpaint order. If the image passes you can proceed with your order straight away. If it fails, you'll get a message saying 'Ops, this image has a bad resolution', which basically means your image is too small and you can't use it. As a result we get emails like this literally one million times a day:
“Hi, your website won’t let me use my image. It says it has a bad resolution. Can you fix it for me?”
Ok, I'm being dramatic, maybe it’s a little less than one million... but you get what I mean. It takes about 10 seconds to resize an image, but because we get sooooo many emails, it can take us one million years to resize each individual image. And why wait millions of years for something you could easily do yourself in less than a minute? You’re probably thinking, ‘shut up internet person, I don’t know how to resize things’. Well, we’re going to teach you how to resize ALL of the things, relax!
This one time we wrote an image resize tutorial for ya’ll using picnik, but then picnik decided not to exist anymore. So on to bigger and better things (things called Aviary, which we've blogged about before)! To get started, go here:
http://advanced.aviary.com/tools/image-editor, click ‘Launch Phoenix’, and follow the instructions below.
I’m going to teach you how to resize your image so it will work for ANY and ALL of our canvas sizes. That’s right, I said it. ANY and ALL. And I'm going to do it in 3 steps.
Step 1: Once Aviary is open, click file > new document > load an image from file. From here you need to select your image from it’s location on your computer, or enter the URL for image if it islocated online.
Step 2: Once your image is loaded on the screen infront of you, click image > image resize. You’ll get this window:
We’re going to crank the pixel dimension right up to full speed on either the height or width measurement (the other measurement will automatically adjust itself). Make sure you have ‘constrain proportions’ ticked as show in the image about. Next click ‘apply’, and BOOM, the resize is complete!
Step 3: Now you just have to save the image to your computer as a JPG and you can upload it to our website. Click file > export image > and then save it to your computer. Make sure you chose to save it as a JPG, and make sure your quality is set to ‘100,’ as shown in the image below.
Next click 'generate image' and once it's done, click 'download'. Make sure you save it to your desktop or somewhere you’ll remember! Too easy right?
Please keep in mind that resizing your image doesn't automatically mean it’s going to look good. Someone smart somewhere once said, “You can’t polish a turd”. If your image looks pixelated and blurry after the resize, we advise you find a larger image as this is what it is going to look like once we print it on to canvas for you. You’ve been warned!
