Home › Forums › Shoot to Serve Assignments › Opportunity: VersePic: "The Lord Directeth His Steps"
- This topic has 8 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 3 months ago by James Staddon.
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December 4, 2016 at 7:17 am #20124Andrew StevensParticipant
Hello all! For Sharpening Character’s VersePics Bible Memory tool of the week, we are in need of an image to backdrop Proverbs 16:9 & 18. “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Requester: Sharpening Character
Purpose: VersePics Bible Memory Tool (See Sharpeningcharacter.com/versepics for more information, and to see examples of past VersePics)
Images Requested: A few ideas for possible image subjects include: winding path, curving road, compass/sextant, footprints, etc. Feel free to come up with your own ideas as well — these are simply “idea starters”.
Remuneration: Being a small organization of 4 guys that is self-funded, we cannot offer any payment at this time. Any submissions received would be regarded as a gift towards advancing the Kingdom of God, and helping others to memorize and meditate on His Word.
Terms: You are granting Sharpening Character (and our partner ministry Courageous Men of the Word) the right to use your image for VersePics (be it this verse, or another at a later date. If the latter, we will verify with you before use.) You continue to retain full rights to your submissions.
Priority: High
Deadline: 11:59 PM Eastern, Thursday, December 8th
Submission Notes: Please add your submissions as Attachments to your Replies. Please do not use links in the Reply, or add your submission directly in the Reply. You have the ability to upload 20 attachments (2MB or smaller) per Reply. You may make multiple Replies, but keep in mind that we only want to view your very best submissions. Only submit images that are horizontal in orientation, and 2000 pixels tall *minimum*. No watermarks, text, or any other image modifications please! We will credit you by your forum name with the Lenspiration Watermark in the final products.
Contact: For questions, please email [email protected]
- This topic was modified 54 years, 3 months ago by .
December 5, 2016 at 11:39 am #20136James StaddonKeymasterThank you @podcast_andrew for sharing your photography needs with us! We are excited to help and can’t wait to see our pictures being used for a great cause!
I’ll submit a shot to start us off….it brings back a lot of fun memories hiking with friends back in October. 🙂 Hopefully, it illustrates the part in the verse that stood out to me most, the idea that one prideful step could lead to a destructive fall.
December 7, 2016 at 1:50 pm #20182Frazer FamilyParticipantDecember 10, 2016 at 2:57 pm #20206Benjamin HolmesModeratorVersePic Explanation:
Hello Lenspiration Community! I’m Ben, the VersePics Director for Sharpening Character. Basically, that’s just a fancy title to say I create all the VersePics and head that ministry up. First off, thank you for your contributions! The winner this week is James Staddon’s photo of a rock climber!(I was not aware that all photos were attachements, so Photo 1)
[This is the Phone version of the VersePic. The tablet or widescreen version is still in development.]Congrats James! Before we get into my explanation of edits, I need to explain something. I don’t have photoshop. In fact, I don’t even have a laptop or a desktop to edit photos! All editing, and I do mean all, is accomplished with my trusty iPad Air 2, and a bevy of fantastic and powerful apps! I’ll explain more about them later.
I’m not going to lie, this picture was a challenge to work with, with the large difficulty being resolution. All of my VersePics require at /at minimum/ a picture with a resolution of 2666 by 2000px. James’s picture was 2000 by 1333px… Needless to say, I’ve dealt with this problem before, and after over a year of steadily making these VP’s (our nickname for the VersePics.), I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve! One of my favorite tricks is blurring up to the needed resolution. This enables me to do something else. Notice the crop here. I’m zoomed in a ways, something that would be problematic even if James’s photo /was/ the resolution I needed! Blurring a picture even slightly can instantly create a very high res image that can be cropped however I want. So, blurring. Great tool. Wait a second! Take a look at that blur. Notice anything special? Here is the original photo cropped square.
(Photo 2)
This blur is special! (And pretty complicated to create) I digitally recreated the depth of field that would have happened with a low aperture, complete with bokeh effect. (Bokeh is more noticeable at a higher power blur) This is something I accomplished with “Patch”. Patch is a brand new app for iOS that mimics what the new iPhone 7 Plus’s dual camera setup can do in Portrait mode. In less geeky terms? Applies a cool blur to a background! Patch allows me to paint over where I /don’t want/ the blur to go, or where the foreground is, and applies the special blur to the background!
(Photo 3)
Its as simple as that! … Well, not really. This is pretty new stuff, and it isn’t flawless tech yet. It’ll look great on your next selfie, but for high res, high quality photography? Its got its problems. Large problems include both the accuracy of your selection of the foreground, and “ghosting”. The (simplified non geeky) way everything works in Patch is the whole picture is given a blur (You have five levels to choose form, the above picture shows the lowest one) and the selected foreground is masked onto the blurred background. This process, and the newness of the tech creates the two problems. The selection is a problem because there as of yet are no “soft” brushes for selection. Instead bots detect the correct selection based on your selection. This is handy for a quick selfie, but can cause problems in landscapes. (The app was originally intended for selfies, but the tech’s to good not to use!) Other problem is caused by the way the app works. It blurs the *whole photo,* /then/ masks. If you take a look at the climbers shirt, you’ll see the effects of ghosting. Ghosting is caused by seeing the object that is in the foreground blurred in the background. The way to fix this is to blur /just the background/ of the photo, and not the entirety, but the tech’s what it is for now, and we just need to deal with it until it’s had more time to figure itself out.
So, how did you deal with those problems? Good question. The answer? Spending a long time fiddling with it and keeping the final product in mind. Here’s the thing. I had to blur the entire image to raise the resolution, meaning the foreground /had to be blurred as well./ That means at the very least I would be blurring twice. That reason alone is why I could use this new tech. When the selection went a little haywire and left parts of the background un-blurred, using Pixelmator, my version of “Photoshop”, I just had to create a normal blur of the photo that looked similar to Patch’s blur, and mask the two photos together when needed, allowing for fine selection of the blur around the edges of the foreground. Similar problems, like the foreground blurring can be solved in the same way. Because I would be blurring the foreground slightly, the edge of the blur would look great as long as I did it well. (Unfortunately, I’m a perfectionist. I spent quite a while on that!)
Great! The selection is fixed! … Ghosting is still there though… Using the same technique didn’t work at all for some reason, so I used Pixelmator’s amazing healing tool. It utilizes Apple’s new (well, sort of new anyway…) graphics engine: Metal. It’s pretty cool. Anyway, healing worked!
Now that we’ve got the blur worked out there, lets move on to the actual edits Honestly, I feel that the less edits you do, the better. If you have to spend hours and hours doing major things to your photos, while there are some exceptions, you’d probably better off just using a different photo! And yes, I know that from experience! As Andrew could tell you, there have been (many more than there probably should have been) times when at the last minute I’ve completely changed everything about a VersePic, meaning small, meaningful edits are of the utmost importance. All that to say, the blur was the biggest job. Once I had figured out what I wanted to do in my head, the edits themselves were simple.
(Image 4)
[Doing some editing in Pixelmator]
Not much, but it makes quite a difference! Notice the ghosting is gone, but I haven’t blurred the foreground yet.One edit I think a lot of people get can stumble over is saturation. Pictures should be believable. Its a very important tool, but one to be leery of using. I use it here along with all of the other edits to create a scene that looks like it is sunset. The extra contrast just pulls it all together, making the picture look believable.
With that, I just need to fiddle around with the verses and reference! That usually can take around or over an hour making it look just right, as well as finding the right font out of my library of over… Umm. Who knows how many?!? Its over 300 for sure, but I don’t have a number. For this, another app comes into play, who’s been my faithful companion for over a year and a half, and through which every VP has been made in. I can’t say enough for “Over”. Really. Can’t. In fact, I just won’t because I know that I’ll get carried away… (I always do…)
(Image 5)
[Editing in Over]The foreground is now blurred, which brings the focus to God’s Word, where it should always be!
Thanks once again to James for his photo, and to all of you who submitted to help others meditate and memorize God’s Word!!! I’m excited to continue to partner with you all!
May God Bless you!
Ben
http://www.sharpeningcharacter.comDecember 10, 2016 at 2:58 pm #20207Benjamin HolmesModeratorDecember 10, 2016 at 3:00 pm #20210Benjamin HolmesModeratorDecember 12, 2016 at 12:53 pm #20220James StaddonKeymasterWhat an excellent explaination!!! I have so much to learn when it comes to mobile editing. In fact, I didn’t even know you could do editing at that level of detail on mobile devises. Thanks so much @bensharpeningcharacter. You’ve taken such great care and time to explain this, I’ll share it elsewhere, like on the blog or something.
Looking forward to the next VP!
December 14, 2016 at 12:23 pm #20444Frazer FamilyParticipantNice – great job!
December 22, 2016 at 8:32 pm #20546James StaddonKeymasterIf you would like to comment on this thread or ask a question about this topic, you can do so on the blog post where this content was shared: Detailed Photo Editing on Mobile Devices Is Actually Possible With These 3 Amazing Apps!
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