Layered Gardens

Ever since a trip to the Apple Store at the mall, I've been experimenting with this one app called Afterlight. The whole episode started off when I was looking for a good app to edit pictures conveniently on an Apple device. We went to the Apple store for other reasons and after browsing on the iPad's, I coincidentally found the "perfect" app. When we came back home, the first thing I did was look up the app and install it. I played with it for a good half hour that day. There's so much to do and so many looks you can give your pictures. Afterlight can edit the basics of the picture, place filters, and even add on other cool effects like light leaks or layering pictures on each other. I highly recommend it as a picture editing app. So these pictures (the same ones that are in my previous post about Longwood Gardens) are the results of some editing I did using Afterlight. Three of these pictures below are used with a technique called layering. Well, I call it layering. It basically means that you take one picture and make it transparent. Then, you stick it on top of another so that you can see both pictures (one transparent and one as the orginal). It's like a two in one package deal.

I had a vision that the purple flower on the left could shoot for the stars. There's so much that can be done with it. So many filters, so many ways to edit the lighting, and so many ways to enhance it by changing the color. I took the purple flower and layered on a picture of the gardens right on top. I was looking for a picture that was full and completely busy. (It would look odd if I had single flowers layered on top.) This garden picture was the perfect one in my eyes, and I used the app to just layer it on. Afterlight let me choose how transparent I wanted the second picture to shine through. After going through the options, making the gardens less visible on the purple flower looked better. After all that, I quickly fixed the shadows, exposure, highlights, temperature, contrast, and clarity.

I changed this picture in afterlight as well.  I did a little more than the previous picture though. So, my intention here was to get a reflection feel. As if you were looking through a glass and seeing a garden as well as the reflection on the glass of the garden right behind you. On the final image below, the top half is a better representation of what I was going for. So I layered the picture on the right, right on top of the one on the left. I placed it on softly, not making the flowers look too rigid against each other. Then, I tweaked the exposure, highlights, sharpness, shadows, clarity, and contrast. After that, I went into the light leaks option, and chose one that was on the corner of the picture. Light leaks basically adds fake sources of light into the picture. In this picture, it is on the left corner, which is brighter than the rest of the picture. I guess it justs adds to the whole confusion of the reflection idea

  

These two pictures are so similar in structure. The long stalks of flowers, the darkened edges, and even the background is uniformed. I really wanted to mess around with the left image because of the vivid pink, so I scanned through my options and decided to layer it with a similar picture. After layering it on, I realized the whole flower part is confusing to look at. It looks like a breed of some weird flower, but then you see some spooky shadows in the back and the right side of the picture is unclear. 

At this point, after layering on three pictures before, I decided to just play around with the different filters and the whole lighting/color of the picture on Afterlight. The original has a better portrayal of the different color schemes on the flowers. Pink in the front, purple in the middle, and blue all the way in the back. On the app, I first picked a filter and then tweaked the shadows, highlights, etc. After playing around with it, the entire picture looked so different. In my opinion, the new picture looks better by itself, without comparing it to the original picture.