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I’m just wondering, on the Sharpening Character website they have quite a few versepics. Does anyone know how they make them? I would like to make a few with some of my photos for our church website.
As the person who creates the VersePics, I might be able to help a little! 🙃 What would you like to know specifically?
You could check out some of @bensharpeningcharacter’s previous posts about them here:
https://www.lenspiration.com/members/bensharpeningcharacter/forums/
I know some of the posts go into some detail about the creation process.
@bensharpeningcharacter, mainly what I want to know is what editing software(s) you use. Thanks!
As far as the text goes, I create all of the VersePics on my iPad in Over! I cannot recommend you try it out highly enough, and as it is free to use, you don’t have a reason not to! (I do, however, use Over Pro, the $40 a year subscription to unlock all of the graphic packs they release every week. Not being a pro member should in no way impact your ability to create VersePics.)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/over-edit-add-text-to-photos/id535811906?mt=8
https://madewithover.comBeyond that, I’ve put together a suite of 24 apps that allow me to edit photos in whatever way I could possibly want, with the main highlight being Affinity Photo, a proffesional iPad exclusive app that literally is the Mac and PC version of the Photoshop competitor running on my iPad! (A $40 one-time purchase.)
Anything else you’d like to know about specificallly or generally?
@bensharpeningcharacter, ok, thank you! The only other thing I can think of is how you blur the background.
Not entirely sure what you mean by that Ryan.
Do you mean how I can create a bokeh effect on an image or how I can blur the entire image to help the text stand out?
@bensharpeningcharacter, how you blur the image to help the text stand out.
Hey Benjamin! (sorry for breaking in—feel free to continue your chat with Ryan, and I’ll just eavesdrop)
You use Affinity? Sweet! So do I! But it’s not entirely an iPad exclusive app. I have the desktop version on my iMac (and you can now get it for Windows as well).I use Affinity Photo for Windows, and I love it! When I first started using it there were a few bugs because it was still in beta, but it seems to be pretty stable now. I do not regret a single penny that I paid for it. It’s worlds ahead of GIMP as far as modern features like non-destructive edits. 🙂
And when I said exclusive, Logan, I meant the program is exclusive to iOS on mobile platforms (No Android version.). I think I mentioned earlier that there were Mac and PC versions as well (the iOS app is a redesigned port of the Mac app), but in any case, Serif is an awesome company all the way round! 😁 Greatly looking forward to their announced release of Affinity Designer on the iPad as well!
Actually, Ryan, I have a lot of things that I can do to make the text stand out beyond just blurring the photo, and the most important of those is simply being selective when looking for photos! Some photos simply are too “busy” for a verse to stand out against and are frankly lost causes. For every VersePic, I try to have between five to twenty different photos to choose from that all fit the verse so that I can be sure to have a few options that will work.
Now, if I have a photo that I want to use that the text isn’t standing out enough from, there are a variety of things I can do:
The first is to make sure that the text is either absolutely white or a very dark color (It doesn’t need to be perfectly black, but that often will work the best.). A lot of people like to make their text colorful, but after two years of doing this, I can assure you 1) that things will look a LOT better if you keep it simple and stick to either white, dark-grey or black; and 2) you loose a lot of contrast when you try coloring text, which means the text WILL blend in more regardless of what other color you choose. My rule of thumb is to stick to white as much as possible.
The second thing to mention is shadows. I believe heavy shadowing, though it might help the text stand out, is distracting enough that it isn’t worth it (with design being as subjective as it is, though, I have to make the disclaimer that this is my opinion and people will disagree with it!). My rule of thumb is that if I can immediately “see” that there is a shadow, I need to make it lighter. To put it another way, shadowing should not be a fix-all. Two tips I can give you in this area are 1) choose a dark color FROM THE PHOTO to be the shadow’s color (this will look MUCH more natural and help you achieve a darker shadow without anyone noticing), and 2) try using blend modes such as screen, soft light, or multiply. A light shadow with multiply will often look much more natural than any other type of shadow because instead of artificially adding a color to the image, you are simply darkening the colors that are already in the image! Good stuff.
(Quick note, I feel the same way about outlines that I do about heavy shadowing. It doesn’t look natural to me, and though it may help the text stand out, I would argue not in a good way… Again, the subjective art of design. 😉 )
One more thing before I actually answer your question about blurring (we’ll get there, I promise! 😉). Occasionally, I run into a photo I “have to use”, but I can’t find a way to get the text stand out, and nothing I try looks good. In cases like these, I have a secret weapon that I try not to use often, but is very effective—shapes! If I can’t get text to stand out against a background, I’ll give the text a background that it CAN stand out against! I will say, however, that I will always let the photo underneath the shape shine through by either using blend modes or low opacities to achieve an effect similar to glass that looks much more natural than a solid color. Additionally, while often a single shape at 50% opacity might not look that great, three shapes at 25% often will. Try and find a nice pattern to arrange shapes in if you are using a couple of them though. (Again, for a disclaimer, I say this in terms of a VersePics, wallpapers, and SIMPLE shapes such as rectangles, triangles, ect… not in terms of complex shapes or of design in general.)
Finally, to specifically address your question, one more thing that I can do is to blur the background of the photo, and I can do that in three different ways.
The first is to soften the background directly under the text. To do that, I’ll customize the text to what I want in Over with the correct crop and all of that, and jump over to Affinity (or Pixelmator, if you would like a little bit less expensive editor!). In Affinity I can put in the photo and photo with text in separate layers (or even just put in a PNG of the text, if I wanted to go that route), match them up, and then by putting the text layer on top and setting a low opacity, I can see where the text is and ONLY soften the area under or around the text. I’ll export the photo when I’m happy and then put it back into Over to export the finished VersePic. Selective softening or blurring can be subtle enought to not be noticeable but effective enough to work really well, depending on the size of your text.
Bonus tip here, you can also soften the background by “smudging” if you have a painting application like Procreate. Most photo editors, such as Pixelmator (iOS and Mac), Photoshop (Mac and PC), and Affinity (iOS, Mac, and PC) have similar functionality, but I find I personally like the quality and control over the effect that I have in painting applications more.
The second way is to blur the entire photo or add a fake bokeh/blur effect to add depth of field. I used to do the selective bokeh by putting a photo in an app that is now called Fore (I forget what it used to be called….) and process the same photo multiple times to achieve different levels of realistic blur/bokeh. Once I finished with that, I’d import the photos as layers into Pixelmator to stitch the layers together into a realistic photo. Now that I have Affinity with advanced selection tools, layer masks, and at least ten different types of realistic blurring and bokeh effects, that process is much simpler! 😂 Beyond specialty blurs, Over provides a great tool to blur photos or objects using a Gaussian blur, or I could of course go back to Affinity to get the specific effect I’m going for.
The third way to blur a photo is to go to the root of the problem (too much detail for the text to stand out), and simply address that by “removing details” either by painting the photo or by using filters. When I say “painting the photo,” I really mean two things. I could use an app like BeCasso, Brushstroke, or Oilist to literally “paint” my photo, at which point I could choose how much detail should be there, or I could literally paint ON the photo to tone down distracting details. I did this with a photo James gave me a while back and painted fog onto his image of a forest with light streaming in to soften the contrast and acheive a moody effect. My go to app in cases like this is Procreate, and through using a photorealistic water brush, the final effect looked pretty good!
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… I like to talk about my work… sorry for getting carried away! 😂 Let me know if I didn’t address your question or if you have any other questions!
And it doesn’t hurt that it is only a ONE-TIME purchase of $50, Ezra! Take that Adobe! 😂 Not a fan of subscription based services over here.
@bensharpeningcharacter, thank you for your insight!
Thank you SO MUCH @bensharpeningcharacter for sharing how you do this!
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