I came home late one night last week and noticed the moon looking amazing. The night before that, it was covered in clouds. The first time I tried photographing the moon (here) was the Blood Moon and it was ok, but not great. So I was excited to try again.
Then, I decided to play around with the photo in some editing apps. I am obsessed with photo editing apps and have a lot of fun playing with them. Usually, when I’m on a morning flight, I edit photos (like crazy). Evening flights, I write short stories.
So, first up, I opened the photo in Pixlr, which is a great app to use to add overlays to your photos, You can also add a second photo to create a double exposure. It also has a great collage feature too. You can use it to add text, but it’s not my favourite for text. More on that later.
So, in Pixlr, I loaded the photo and selected the “Overlay” menu. Inside this menu, there are a huge range of overlay types that you can choose from and I played for quite a while, but I decided I wanted to put my moon into context, so I chose the “Space” Overlay set and selected the one that gave me the effect below. It’s called “Yildun”
I then decided to add some colour to this photo so I went into the “Solaris” menu, which is another Overlay type. I just flicked through them until I found one that I really liked. It’s called “Shimmer” and I think it has a quality that looks like our expectation of space.
So, onto my text apps. I LOVE the Typic app for it’s range of text. It’s what I generally use for the #photorehabcovermakeover designs. I opened the original photo in Typic and added the main quote text and played around with the fonts to find one that I liked for it. Then I decided I wanted to highlight the word breathe. So, I removed it from the quote and added it again so that I could choose a different font. I added a third text box with the quote reference (even though this one is apparently anonymous). Isn’t it a beautiful quote?
Finally, lately I’ve been playing with a new “app” called Canva. This is not an iPhone app, it’s a website. You can upload your own photos or use theirs. It’s really cool because it allows you to customise the size of your image to whatever size you like, but it also has some pre-designed sizes that are specific for certain social media platforms – so there is a remade size for Instagram posts, for your Facebook cover photo, for posters, for cards, all sorts of things. It also has a huge range of fonts available as well as colours and also text design elements that you can customise. I don’t use this one as much because I’m not at my computer very often, but it’s fun and very easy to use.
For this one, I chose square dimensions (Instagram size) and uploaded my file. Then I added the text and chose a font that I liked. I did the same for the quote reference and then downloaded the resulting image as a .png file. Very easy to do.
I hope you enjoyed this little run through of what I like to do with my photos. It’s fun and creative and can give you some really great effects. If you haven’t tried these apps before, give them a go, they are my GO-TO apps for designs.
I shall send these to Lucile’s Photo101 Rehab Clinic.
Happy Father’s Day to all those Dad’s who are celebrating it today 🙂
x desleyjane
Musings of a Frequent Flying Scientist 
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