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There was a time for when probably most of us for our general work, educating or business
or wherever; we didn’t touch images very much. There might have been some more specialist
photographers, or graphics people on the team, etc, who are involved in touching up or making
images for flyers and newsletters, that sort of thing.
But I would argue that today it’s probably a pretty common skill that most of us need
to use. Whether it’s for doing presentations or whether it’s for preparing blog images,
doing a header for a blog post, that kind of thing. So the ability to just quickly use
the iPad and step through and creating some sort of standout images is probably a much
more common skill than it once was.
So obviously you’ve got to start with some kind of interesting image, and of course we
always suggest maybe using the grid lines on the camera app, turning those on so you
can actually line up some of the things in your frame. This one is actually, I don’t
know how you guys feel, but probably is a boring image at the moment. Yeah there’s
a little bit of a sunset there and some clouds. You can see the workflow down the side here
that I’m actually suggesting.
Okay so obviously you want to take it with your camera app. There’s a range of camera
apps. I tend to just use the standard camera app, this is on your iPhone or iPad or whatever
device you’re using. I tend to just take it with the standard camera app and then start
to move through a workflow like this. So, here’s our simple one. We’ve taken the
image, what can we do with this one now?.. So just by using a free app called Snap Seed
we can start to see just by applying what’s called a Drama Filter. And as I say Snap Seed
is fantastic because it’s free. And all you have to do is just swipe your finger to
make these kinds of adjustments and changes. So already we’re getting a bit more contrast
and colour. That took all of 20 seconds to load the photo into Snap Seed, apply a filter
and save it. Starting to look a bit more interesting now.
If we move onto an effects app like Wow Effects, as an example, you can probably spot what’s
changed there. A little bit more of a filter. We’ve kind of brought out some of the colour
a bit more, but just added that little bird there. And Wow Effects is an app which lets
you add all kinds of things. We could have added a light, we could have added clouds,
all kinds of things, but I just chose to add that one little bird. Just for a bit of added
drama I guess, as we of bring out the storm as contrasted with the setting sun. Starting
to get a bit of narrative for our image now. And that’s just something you can play around
with with Wow Effects all the range of little add-ins that you can do. Just to start to
support what you’re wanting your image to tell to your audience.
Just a little bit more of a dramatic filter there. And sometimes you might wanna just
go straight to Instagram, if you’re an Instagram user and you use some of those stock filters.
They’re become a quite boring now, because they’ve been over used so much by people.
So I recommend another app called Afterlight which gives you a lot more control filter
options and various borders etc, just to pull out the bits and pieces that you would really
like.
And then finally and especially if you wanting this to be as a I said a title image for a
blog post etc, you might want to pop it into an app like Over which lets you use a whole
range of different fonts and texts and you can easily apply that over the top of your
image. This idea of freedom and hope in the wings of the storm, all that kind of stuff.
So we’ve kind built up like I said a bit of a Narrative. Brought the colour and the
contrast out a lot more. And this is a process that really would only take you a couple of
minutes possibly, once you were used to using those apps. I think Over is a couple of dollars.
Afterlight, Wow Effects, they’re all a couple of dollars. And Snap Seed as I said is free.
And for a full photo editing suite that’s not a bad price. As I said, compare it to
doing the same kind of process on a PC, and traditionally the kind of expense and software
that you’d had to have, is quite different.
And with images and photography, moving from one App to the other is very simple. If you’ve
used an iPad, iPhone, or even Android has a gallery. On the iPhone/iPad you have the
Camera Roll. It’s inside the photos App. And every one of these, obviously the camera
saves to the Camera Roll. When I open that image in Snap Seed, I save it back to the
camera roll. In Wow Effects, I open that image from the camera roll, save it back there.
So each time you just open it from the camera roll and saving it back there. And part of
the beauty of that is that every stage is also preserved- every stage of my edits. And
then if I get to right down the end here and decide actually no I don’t like what I did
in Snap Seed, I can go back to the original one because all the different versions will
be saved in the camera roll. So that’s actually an advantage of doing things this way.
With other files it’s a little bit different. And Apple has a thing called Open In. So if
you’re working with work like Text files, and various other files. Video is saved in
camera roll as well, but other files you’ll need to use what’s called the Open In.
I’ll quickly show you a couple of what I call single workflows. So if you’re working
with audio, I’d recommend Audiobus as an app for you to use. It actually has a built-in
workflow process where you can chain a few apps together. You could be working in one
app, have a beat going, switch to another app, keep that beat going, but play some piano
over the top, and Audiobus will keep all those going in the background. You can then feed
it down through some other apps and into Garageband, which is probably the most capable I guess,
in terms of bringing all those different sounds together. So that’s definitely a workflow
for audio. You can use other apps as well and put them together in Twitsted Wave which
is an audio editor and push it to Garageband that way as well. So you can do some stuff
in Audiobus and then in other apps outside that and pull them together there.
So that’s kind of another single workflow. Another one we might talk about is sharing
files. This is where you can see us talking about this idea of using the ‘Open In Dialogue’.
For this we’re talking about something pretty simple you’ve created something already
you’ve typed something up, you’ve taken an image, you’ve made some audio. From those
apps you can actually store them on your iPad and there’s one that I recommend called
‘Documents’. It’s a free app which is always nice, and Documents will plug into,
let you store your files locally on your iPad. It’ll also plug into Dropbox, Google Drive,
Sky Drive and the various other cloud services as well. So, if you’re like me and you use
several of those services, Documents is a great one for bringing all that together.
And I might of created one of those files like I said I can then open it into Documents
and store it there. So Documents is in a way bridges that gap back to the PC a little bit
by giving you a central kind of storage kind of place. And from there of course you can
open it into share it through other places. Once you’ve got it in Documents or wherever
you want to store it, you can then share it. So that’s sort of a single workflow in terms
of storing and then sharing your files.
But let’s move over to talking about Multitask Workflow now. Instead of those Single Workflows,
once you’ve mastered that idea of ok for our photos we’re going to chain these few
things together and end up with our final product, it might be that there’s actually
a higher project that you want to work on. Maybe you want a series of images and text
and video packaged together for publishing. And that’s what I tend to call this multi-workflow
idea. So for text there’s a workflow you might move through. You might have your notes
program or whatever you’re typing in open, you might then switch to safari do some research
copy some texts etc. from there. Once you’re kind of happy with your rough draft you might
put it in something like Pages where you can type set it a lot better and set it up the
way that you want it and then you might export it as a PDF which can then go into something
like the Adobe Reader App. So that’s sort of a workflow so you’ve built up some text
in whatever form that you want. You might then also want to do up the image workflow,
some images to go with your project that you’re making. So you could use that image workflow
that we talked about. There’s the audio that we talked about.
Another one we didn’t go through was video. Very much in the same way as you can go through
with images, you can do a very similar thing with video. Take your video with your camera.
Video Grade is a great app for the video. You may want to tone down some of the colours
or brighten some areas and it’s quite a professional level app for doing that kind
of stuff. If you then decide you’re wanting a bit more of a narrative or a feel to it
‘8mm’ or other apps like it will put filters. You know, if you decide you want it to be
like a 1920’s old time black and white you can do that. Or kind of a 70’s faded colour.
You’ve got all these choices with how you want your film to look. You might be happy
with it there or you might even go into an App like Explain Everything which then lets
you talk over the top, write and draw on the screen while all the stuff that’s in there
is playing and then export it all as a video.
And once you’ve done those single workflows, then it’s time to package it all together
and this is where it gets really interesting – “how can I package all those bits together
purely on my iPad using this workflow idea?” Well a presentation is a great way to fit
all those things together and Keynote, which has recently been updated with some new tools,
is one I’d recommend for that presentation but there are other apps as well.
You might want to create an eBook so your photos, your video, your text are all in an
eBook which you can then export to iBooks or somewhere else so you’ve got that nice
page turning and people still being able to experience all your videos together in that
eBook form.
Also you can open-in these files or use the + button which is a universal button in iOS
for adding your photos or your other things in and embed them in Book Creator. You might
want your final package purely as a video so you might use an app like iMovie where
you can add titles over the top and you can add music. You can add extra narration that
sort of thing as well. So there’s a few different ways you can think about once you’ve
mastered these single workflows, you can think about now packaging them all together at the
end there.
There’s also some totally new ways almost of putting this stuff together so presentations
yeah we’re pretty used to that. Video files, yeah we’re kind of used to that, but as
I said the iPad is becoming a platform that can do things that the PC could never really
do in that zone and Flow Board is an app which is kind of part webpage, part presentation,
part slide show gallery in the way that it combines all this different stuff. And all
of it can be done again on the iPad, fairly simply and easily just dragging with your
finger all these different elements that you’ve created with the other workflows so it’s
definitely one that I’d recommend.
Ok so really it’s getting the idea for your project or your work, “oh ok I’ve got
this series of apps and how I could put them together to be more productive with the iPad”.
Get more out of it in that turn and just take advantage of how it is different from the
PC, I guess changing that mindset, was really the message that I wanted to share with you
guys today.
Thank you for that, cheers.