How I edited Odaiba Fountain on my iPhone

I’m starting a new series on my blog today, called iPhone Post-Processing, or iPP, for short. These posts are meant to complement my Instagram uploads as they describe in more detail how I post-processed the uploaded image. Sometimes it may be as simple as opening up a single app and straightening the image, while other times it may involve lengthier process of editing through a number of apps.

These blog posts will hopefully inspire you to try something new with your post-processing techniques, because the more you experiment with your images, the more you’ll learn what can be done with them.


The image below is what I captured from the iPhone 6 Plus native camera. I shot this through a window while travelling on a monorail, so there’s a rather ugly green cast to the image.

Straight out of the iPhone 6 Plus native camera
Straight out of the iPhone 6 Plus native camera

I imported the image to VSCOcam, and straightened the image out.

Straightened image.
Image straightened in VSCOcam.

With any cityscape photography, it’s important—or desirable-to fix your verticals so that they are straight. Eliminating any perspective distortion goes a long way in making a clean image. There are several apps that do this, but I have always used Perspective Correct, which does the job. The resulting effect here is subtle, but evident if you look on the right side of this image.

Perspective corrected to make verticals, vertical.
Perspective corrected to make verticals, vertical.

I reimported the image into VSCOcam, (deleting the first imported version). I then did my first pass of editing by applying my favourite filter of the bunch, K2. This reduces some of the green cast while making other colours a little richer. In the editing suite, I sharpened the image (typically about 2-3), and cropped it to a square format for Instagram. Normally I would go further and perhaps adjust the saturation, fade and/or shadows, but for this image, I exported it back to my camera roll for further editing.

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Thought Process
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In cropping this photo, my intention was to give more importance to the fountain. I did this by cropping out the noise surrounding the fountain, and placing it around 1/3rd of the way up from the bottom of the frame. This position is key as it allows the eye to flow naturally within the frame, ending at the fountain.

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First pass of editing done in the VSCOcam app to remove some green tint through the K2 filter.
First pass of editing done in the VSCOcam app to remove some green tint through the K2 filter.

I imported this image into Mextures, which does a great job at adding subtle colour to your image. The trick is to do it in a way that it’s not recognizable. I applied some Landscape Enhance and Radiance filters, and added some Fade and Sharpen settings. This brought some much needed colour to the image and opened up the shadow areas.

My formula for this edit is: QRGMIXS.

The final edited image is below, and that’s what I uploaded to Instagram. It’s considerably better than what I started off with, and I’m quite happy with the results.

Final editing done with the Mextures app to add more colour and clean up image.
Final editing done with the Mextures app to add more colour and clean up image.

Apps Used:

Perspective Correct
Perspective Correct
VSCOcam
VSCOcam
Mextures
Mextures
Instagram
Instagram

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