iPhoneography Apps – iColorama 2: What is iColorama? – Adjust and Tone

In a first for “enthusiasm noted”, I have a giveaway to announce! Teresa Alonso, developer of iColorama, has given me 10 promo codes for free copies of iColorama. An awesome app absolutely free! What could be better than that? Just drop me a line at juryjone @ gmail.com, and I’ll send you a code. Then use iColorama, create beautiful works, and talk it up to your friends.

In my first entry on iColorama a couple of weeks ago I talked about the app layout and its powerful masking feature. However, in amongst all the discussion, I didn’t manage to say what iColorama is. Is it a painting program? That would be an easy thing to say, given the use of some really nice brushes. But it is designed to deal with photographs as the basis for your creations, although, as I showed you in the previous post, it is possible to start with a solid color or a gradient as yourbase. So, then, is it a photo-editing suite, like Snapseed, Filterstorm, or Photoshop Touch? Well, no, it isn’t – and today’s post will describe why iColorama isn’t for editing photos. (So what IS iColorama? Stick around to the end and I’ll tell you.)

Today’s post will describe the two submenus (Adjust and Tone) that include tasks that should be familiar to those who use photo-editing apps, such as exposure, saturation, and black & white conversion. They are implemented in ways that are counter-intuitive, so my descriptions of them might sound harsh. It’s not harsh, though, when you realize that this program is not trying to be a replacement photo editor.

Here’s the picture I’ll be working with today – our cat demanding that we play with the colorful toy at his feet. The first thing that I would want to do to edit the photo is to bring the cat out a little more, so I will want to mask the changes to only affect the cat.

Masks stay in place as you change from effect to effect, so I find it easiest to mask using a very obvious change. I use Gradient, under the preset menu. I tap the target symbol, invert the mask. adjust the brush, and start painting in the effect (gradient).

Once I have the mask correct, I can switch the effect from Gradient to an effect which brings the cat out of the shadows.

I decided to try Tone Lab. It has three controls: White Level, Bias and Saturation. I’m not sure exactly what those first two are supposed to do, but by sliding White Level slightly to the left and Bias almost all the way left, I get an effect which looks somewhat natural in the picture as a whole. Those controls take some of the color away, so I slide the Saturation a goodly amount to the right.

I still want the cat to have some more contrast, so I go to Exposure. This also has three controls (Brightness, Contrast and Exposure), but they all are self-explanatory and operate much as you would expect them to. I only need a tad more contrast, so I tap the slider to the right.

Next, I want a little more structure in the cat’s hair. I could do that with Sharpen (under the Effects menu), but there’s a method of sharpening familiar to Photoshop users called a high pass filter. Here it’s just called High. There are four presets here, and I find that the third is the most natural-looking. (Remember, I’m trying to do naturalistic photo editing here.)

The result was still too harsh, so, I faded back the opacity to a little over 50%. That pretty much makes the cat look how I want.

Next we’re going to address the ribbons on the toy, which I want to be more vibrant in color. I discard the mask over the cat, and paint one in over the ribbons.

Here’s where things get a little troublesome. In most photo editors, Vibrance means more saturation to those colors that are not already saturated, and not skin tones. Here, when I try to add vibrance, my red ribbons turn black (see below). The Gamma control makes it lighter or darker (too light or dark and no color can be discerned). Saturation works just as you would expect, and just like the same control under Tone Lab. I use the Saturation control instead of the Vibrance control, since Vibrance does not do what I expected.

Since Saturation controls are included under Tone Lab and Vibrance, then what can be done with the menu item Saturate? I don’t really know. By now I’ve discarded the mask, which means Saturate is affecting the entire picture below. There are three controls: Brightness, Darkest and Gamma. Leaving the controls at the default settings makes major changes to the photo; adjusting the controls enhances the effect. It does saturate colors and affect contrast, but controlling it is a matter of experimentation, and it does not work like your usual saturation control.

The next menu item is Shadows. In photo editing, a shadow control would normally make your shadows lighter and your highlights darker, so you could see more detail. In iColorama it is the complete opposite. Highlights makes your bright areas brighter; Shadows makes your dark areas darker. It’s like a contrast control in one direction.

Using the Bleach slider increases the contrast and takes some of the color out. It’s a useful effect when trying to make a photo look older, but I’m not sure why it’s here under Shadows.

Channels also doesn’t behave as I expected. I expected it to allow for white balancing by adding, say, a little more red to balance out the blue. Alternatively, it could allow for swapping of channels – say, red for green – to produce some funky color changes. However, I could not figure out the use of the presets and the red, blue and green sliders. There are some interesting effects possible here, but they’re not controllable in the way I expect.

HDR does work as I expected – lowering the contrast so you can see into the shadows and highlights, but emphasizing the edges so the detail pops. There are five presets and controls for brightness, exposure and bleach, so the combinations are endless. One thing that would be an improvement would be to allow the HDR to be applied in Luminosity blend mode, so the colors are not affected (they have a tendency to be over-saturated in HDR).

I like the HDR, but it was too harsh, so I faded it back to about 10%.

The fifth preset is an interesting look, and seems like it would be a good starting point for some creative endeavor.

Now let’s take a look at the Tone submenu. In a way, it’s the color submenu, since every effect affects the color (or lack of color). The first effect is Enhance. There are five presets and no controls other than opacity. I may be missing something, but I don’t see anything here that can’t be accomplished elsewhere in iColorama.

Pastel is next, and it is just a subtler color change than Enhance, with 20 presets.

Next comes Tint, and we have 17 more harsh color changes.

The difference with Tint is that you can apply the color changes in a blend mode. Here is the same Tint preset, only this time in Lighten blend mode rather than normal.

I find that with Enhance, Pastel, Tint, and Channels, along with the three Colors options under Presets, that there are too many ways to change colors around without a decent way to white-balance (which should be present in a photo editing app). This many methods without a clear-cut way of dictating the changes is very confusing.

The next option is Lomo, which is a set of presets/filters that make the picture look as though it was taken by a toy camera, with its resulting color shifts. The ten presets can be applied in other blend modes, which is great.

Duotone gives you a B&W photo tinted slightly with blue, green or purple, as various B&W film processing did.

Sepia is also monochrome, but with a brown tint.

The B&W option has 18 presets, which give you the look as if you used a color filter while shooting on B&W film. There are also differing contrast levels.

BW&C seems as though it should allow you to convert an entire picture to B&W except for a single item – say, a single flower in a field. Instead it converts it to B&W except for a single color, wherever it occurs on the picture. In our example, the red in the cat’s fur is in color in addition to the red of the toy. I don’t particularly see the use of this, and color accent is handled better in programs that are dedicated to this type of photo editing.

The final feature is Match, which is used to make the color palettes of two photos match. I could not find a photo that changed our cat picture to good effect with Match, so instead I used this landscape.

Tapping the landscape icon at the lower right brings up your photo library for you to pick another photo to “match”.

In this case I used a photo I took at a festival with a person dressed as a hot dog. Because the predominant color was the green from the hot dog cart, the landscape got a greenish tinge. The Feature slider seems to make the picture lighter and darker, but it may be that it is doing something subtler like affecting which tones (shadows, midtones, highlights) were affected most by the matching.

Conclusion

As I said, I was looking at these two submenus (Adjust and Tone) as if iColorama was a photo editing app. In discussions with the developer and in seeing iColorama as it is actually used (in the Facebook group), it is evident that this is not what iColorama is. iColorama is not a photo editing app or a painting app; it is a creative app. Adjust and Tone are not designed to make a good-looking photo before using the other creative tools in the app; they are for use after creating your artwork, for final tuning. That doesn’t mean that these effects couldn’t or shouldn’t be made clearer or easier to work with, because there’s certainly room for improvement. But just as some of the more “out there” tools (which we’ll examine later) encourage experimentation, these “finishing touches” require you to experiment as well. Don’t come into iColorama with a set idea on what you want your result to look like – experiment and let the app surprise you! Then, learn from your experiments what works for you, and you’ll find yourself incorporating iColorama into your workflow on a regular basis to get the effects you can’t get anywhere else.