Saturday, March 15, 2014

A Find Begets Art

A new app showed up on my iPad the other day, one of the joys of sharing an AppleID with the rest of the household, I guess, so I thought I'd try it. Waterlogue (waterlogueapp.com) takes any image and transforms it into a watercolor painting. Controls are very, very basic, but the effect can be nice.

From top to bottom, Isla Okiddo (two images), the Mhindepinde Rez Zone, Sandy Trail, and Tatty Soup. Full-sized images can be found on in my Watercolor Interpretations set on Flickr. Additional commentary (though not much) is also posted with each image. Below are the originals (sort of ... you get the idea).


Having never been one for watercolors myself, though I did an awful lot of them in high school, I think the effect works reasonably well. Landscapes are best. Portraits look odd. Could be just me. I'm often told the only taste I have is in my mouth.

I would like to do quite a few more of these, but the process to get the image into the iOS app and back out was quite cumbersome:

  1. Copy images to Dropbox from my iMac.
  2. Copy images from Dropbox on iOS to the Photos app (best not do this with nudes as our whole family shares the Apple ID and that means Naughty Uccie would appear on my mother's iPad).
  3. Open the images in Waterlogue and edit.
  4. Save the new images to the Photos App.
  5. E-Mail the final images to myself and open via E-Mail on the iMac, or
  6. Sync the Photos app with Dropbox and open the images on the iMac.
  7. Discover that you now have 3-4 copies of all the images scattered all over the place.

Until Waterlogue adds direct access to Dropbox I'll have to struggle. If I had a newer iMac I could "AirDrop" the images back and forth.* If I do this enough before getting a newer iMac I should invest in an adapter for the iPad so I can Sneaker Net the files via an SD memory card. My iDevices have some really cool image editors that I'd like to use more often. Like Waterlogue.

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*I'm confused. Apple states that I need an iMac (Early 2009 or newer) and I have an iMac (Late 2009) ... shouldn't it work if I got it after the Early ones were sold? I might need to hit up the Mac users group in SL for advice.

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