Editing Photo Background with Mobile Textures

Posted on the 16 July 2014 by Ninabille @ThoughtsImages


I received the pretty bouquet above last Friday. It is made by my talented colleague - she had both picked the flowers from the nature and bind them to a bouquet herself! 

I wanted to make a Still Life photo of this colourful bouquet - being at work, iPhone was the only camera I had. I placed the flowers on my working desk in front of a white board, close to a window on the left - so the light fell naturally from the left side on the flowers.

This is how I proceeded with the editing:


  • I adjusted the brightness, contrast, ambiance and warmth in the "tune image"-function in the Snapseed application (app).
  •  Then I blurred the background: I made the overall image blurred in Tadaa SLR-app. I then applied the blurred image on top of the non-blurred image in Image Blender-app, masking the bouquet so it stayed sharp.
  • The frames of the white board disturbed the otherwise balanced photo, so I wanted to remove them using the "retouch"-function in Handy Photo-app. I removed also the corner of a wooden chair from the lower left corner.
  • The Tadaa SLR-app removed the upper board line, but it also left a yellow area on the top right corner. So I used Image Blender, layering the left upper corner of the photo on top of the right one. Now I was satisfied with the overall image. The vague white board line in the lower right side didn't bother me - Actually I wanted to keep it, as a memory that the photo was taken on my the last day at the office.
  • Now I started adding mobile textures, to give the background a delicate, painterly effect. I received a set of beautiful textures that match size wise mobile phone cameras by 2 Lil' Owls, as a part of a phone photography-course iPhoneography with Bob Veil, which I have enrolled and look forward of immersing myself in this summer. 
  • I used both ImageBlender, PhotoFusion & Filterstorm-apps to add the texture layers with - Image Blender and Photo Fusion has 18 blending modes you can select from, Filterstorm has 16 blending modes.

You can see my editing process in the video below: 

The bouquet is in our kitchen, bringing the scent of summer inside. The flowers create a delightful color spot, bringing the scent of summer inside! 

I took a picture of them and my "Butter Sun" on Sunday, as I was baking cinnamon rolls. To create a dreamy blur and some depth of field to the images, I took it to the Focal Lab-app, where I added a soft focus effect. I created the pretty polaroid frame to this photo with Polamatic app, that also enables you to add text with 36 different fonts.



Sun is shining again ... I hope to find some wildflowers, so I might learn to bind a summer bouquet myself!

Flowery Greetings fromNinasharing with 

"app" happy wednesdayStill Life - Monthly Meme