Distressed

Lately, the weather has been wintry and bitterly cold.  Somehow I haven't felt much like getting togged up and venturing out with my camera.  But I've been putting the time to good use, looking at other people's work and experimenting a bit here and there with some of my images.  I can't remember where I read about it but I came across a phone app called DistressedFX (only £0.69!) and decided to try it. I'm loving it!

Do you remember this photo in its original form? (See here). This is the same photo, exported to my iPhone, given the DistressedFX treatment and then reimported to my Mac. I really like the result. The program is simply a set of filters and overlays, that can be tweaked slightly for colour saturation, contrast etc. It's so easy and, I think, very effective. There are, of course, many sources of textures and filters on the web, or you can create your own. You can buy beautiful collections for a full size computer or tablet from the same 'Distressed' source (here), but they're much more expensive than the more limited phone app.

The textures themselves are created by Cheryl Tarrant - see her Flickr site (here) or her website (here) for some of her own creative images.