NOTE: After some issues the right version of FlashPhix finally hit the App Store (version 2.2) or download below.
Today our FlashPhix 2.2 for iPhone hit the App Store, it’s probably the app I’ve been the most excited about in a long time!
FlashPhix 2.2 may seem like a small update, but 3 small buttons bring incredible new features to this app. In the “advanced lighting” you can now find 3 buttons to control the color of your lighting to the detail. So now you can alter dark and light tones separately and for each of these two tones you can change the Red, Green and Blue values as well (or combine them).
You can download it here : 
To prove the possibilities of FlashPhix 2.2 we will supply some workshops here to create certain (more customizable) effects similar to the effects from other great but more expensive apps :
Here’s a list of all tutorials :
- Grim Sepia – Spooky Sepia Effects (1 min.)
- Silver – Camerabag silver filter look-a-like (1 min.)
- Toy Cat – Toy Camera look (1 min.)
- Golden Waterfall – High Contrasting colors (1 min. – 3 min.)
- Evening Orange Sky – Change a bright blue sky to evening orange (2-5 min.)
Note: For most of these tutorials you’ll need to access the “Advanced Lighting” panel, which appears in the middle of the screen at the bottom of your image after opening one. Here’s how the button looks :
1. Grim Sepia :
Sepia images are often used to get an old look, but did you know that you can also make your pictures really spooky with those grim brown effects? Here’s how to do this in FlashPhix :
-Use the camera of the iPhone (or a camera app of choice eg. Pro Camera, Camera Genius, …) to take a picture of something that already has this grim feel to it. An old shed, a grim looking tree, a forest in winter, …
For our example, we’ll use the second one, a picture of a spooky looking tree. Which can be downloaded here (GrimSepia_base). Open the image in FlashPhix 2.2.
Now you should get this :
-Now you should open the “Advanced Lighting” panel as described above. You’ll see some slider, 3 colored buttons and a preview.
-First of all, and this is the most important step, we’ll need to filter out red tones, so tap the “Red Channel” button once, it should turn gray. Leave the other buttons as they are. Like this :
-Now we’ll work the sliders, set the “Light” slider to about +44% you can check the value on the left of the slider, it has to read “44″. Do the same for the “Shadow” slider, but set this one to about +66% or “66″. Like this :
-Now set the “Global” slider to about -10% or “-10″ this will make the image a little bit darker, but not too much.
Note that it’s important that you do this after you changed the other sliders! The Global Lighting slider changes the base exposure and when you do it the other way around you will get a different result.
Your screen should look like this now :
Now tap “Apply” and save your image using the harddisk icon in the top left corner. It will now be saved to the camera roll. Wait until you get a confirmation that your image has been saved and now you can either quit FlashPhix by pressing the home button or press the “Return” button in the upper right corner to start all over and try some other settings. Your final image should look something like this :
2. Silver :
There’s a new great filter in camerabag called “Silver” and you can get a similar like effect in FlashPhix 2.1, but let’s call it “Silver with red” as the blue tones are replaced with red-like tones. These can be corrected by processing the image again, but we’ll only handle the FlashPhix silver effect.
For this workshop you can use any image, but images with big bright surfaces work best. Like images with a bright blue sky or snow as in the image we’re going to use. You can download it here : Silver_base (It’s rotated 90 degrees, WordPress did that, so you’ll have to put it back in portrait mode)
We won’t handle the opening procedure in this workshop, so if you want to know how to open an image and go to the “Advanced Lighting”-Dialog, check the first workshop. So we’ll skip to the actual filter settings.
-In the “Advanced Lighting” dialog, Disable the “Blue” channel by tapping it.
-Slide the “Light” slider to +100%, So it should read “100″ on the right of the slider, this will give the light parts on the preview image a yellow glow.
-Slide the “Shadow” slider to a value between +70% and +100%. We’ll go for 71%, but according to your likes you can make the shadows darker or brighter. The darker the shadows, the more you will remove all non blue colors from the picture as well.
So the screen should look something like this :
Now tap “Apply” and Save your image using the save icon, the result should look like this :
3. Toy Cat :
Toy Camera’s are fun and with FlashPhix 2.2 you can get similar toy like effects. Here I’m going to show you how to achieve those on for example your pets to turn them into Toy pets.
For this workshop I’m going to use this image : ToyCat_base. But you can use any image, it looks great on light coloured pets and pictures of yellowish/gray buildings.
-Open your image as explained in the first tutorial and open the “Advanced Lighting” dialog.
-Disable the Red and Blue channels by tapping the “Red Channel” and the “Blue Channel” button, they should turn gray. We only need the “Green channel” to be active for this.
-Set the “Shadow” slider to about +60% to +80%, I’m going for +64% or “64″.
-Set the “Light” slider to about +40% (“40″).
-You can mess around a little bit with the channel buttons according to the Toy effect you want.
So the screen should look something like this :
Now tap “Apply” and Save your image using the save icon, the result should look like this :
4. Golden Waterfall :
High contrasting colors always make amazing pictures and create a high depth and great texture. You achieve this as well with FlashPhix 2.2 and a great example is our Golden Waterfall example. This is truly something that can only be achieved with the waterfall picture or by preprocessing other image to bring out clouds or other light objects against a dark background. You can do this by opening eg. a picture of blue sky with white clouds and open “Advanced Lighting” and pull the “Shadow” and the “Lighting” slider to the same positive amount. In this way you’ll increase contrast. After a save you can use that image again for this tutorial. But we are going to use a great image for this, the waterfall. This picture is great for this as the waterfall contains pure white and the rocks are quite dark. Here’s the image : DarkWaterfall_Base
-Open an image and open the “Advanced Lighting”-dialog as described in workshop 1.
-First we’re simply going to disable the “Blue Channel” by tapping it, it should turn gray. This will remove the blue from the white water and bring out the darkness in the rocks in this case.
-Now drag both the “Light” and “Shadow” sliders to +100% or the maximum (far right). This will increase the contrast dramatically and hence create the beautiful effect of the gold water on the dark blue stones.
So the screen should look something like this :
Now tap “Apply” and Save your image using the save icon, the result should look like this :
5. Evening Orange Sky :
When you think of a “flash” app, you think of an app that adjusts the brightness of a picture, making it a little brighter so 6AM looks like 9AM. But FlashPhix 2.2 can actually make a 12AM picture look like a 9PM summer evening. You know those evenings on which you are in your garden and the sky turns orange and you still feel the warmth on your face as the sun disappears behind the horizon. There really isn’t an app that can create that atmosphere, except for FlashPhix 2.1 of course…
You can use any sky image for this with a bright blue sky and a slightly darker landscape. If your landscape is too bright you can shift both sliders in the “Advanced Lighting” dialog to the right, tap apply, save and reopen the saved image to fix this, but we are going to keep our hands of the contrast preprocessing in this tutorial as the base picture we are going to use in this tutorial is perfect. Here it is : EveningOrangeSky_Base.
-Open an image and open the “Advanced Lighting”-dialog as described in workshop 1.
-First we’re going to disable all channels but the red one, so tap “Green Channel” and “Blue Channel” until they are grayed out and keep the “Red Channel” button red, by not touching it. This is necessary to get a red glow in the sky.
-Drag the “Light” slider to +100% (“100″ or far right) to bring out the red horizon.
-Drag the “Shadow” slider to about +40% (“40″), this will darken the landscape to simulate the summer evening shadows.
-We are going to keep our hands of the global slider as this is all a matter of contrast, you can slightly lower the global sldier value though to simulate nightfall even more. But don’t push it to less than -15% (“-15″)
So the screen should look something like this :
Now tap “Apply” and Save your image using the save icon, the result should look like this :
If you have any question or have a great workshop or technique yourself you can always reply to this post.
