My Percolator Process

Percolator is one of those unique apps that let’s you get create some really interesting artwork. I really enjoy it. When I show some stuff to my friends they often think it would be difficult or take a long time. It doesn’t. It’s fun!

I was having one of those philosophical “thinking about myself” sort of days so I thought I’d see what I could come up with. The shot below is what I ended up with. I’ll walk you through the very quick and easy steps I used to get this one.

I started with an image from Picasso. I used Touch Retouch (mostly the clone tool) to remove the red region on the left side, and also the vertical line on the forehead. That left me with a simpler image to open with Percolator.

Initial image by Picasso

Modified with Touch Retouch

I then used Percolator to create this image using the Treble setting.

Image created with Percolator

At this point I wanted to include some color/texture from a painting my sister did, so I snapped an image of that (which included some glare since it was a sunny afternoon in my living room!).

Snapshot of a painting done by Jala Pfaff

At this point I have the two images I want to use so I import them into Image Blender and use the Color Burn blending mode. This image that is very close to what I wanted.

Composite image from Image Blender

I now used PhotoToaster to remove a bit of color, do a minor crop, and add a frame. If you look at a closeup of the image you can see the texture and some color from the original painting. Here is a small sample, or you can drop by Flickr and view the full size image.

Closeup of my image

I used several apps in the process and ended up with an image that I really like. Since I’m not a professional, that is all that matters to me.

Here are links to the apps that I used.

Percolator (Universal) [download]
Image Blender (Universal) [download]
PhotoToaster (Universal) [download]
TouchRetouch (iPhone) [download]
TouchRetouch HD (iPad) [download]