This is essentially a broken down version of the classic Photoshop with a focus on cutting and simple adjustments. The Lightroom app has more color and filter options if you're at all interested in that. Undoubtedly, the original gives you loads more features. Nevertheless, you still have an unimaginably great amount of possibilities with either one, and Photoshop Mix is the best app for cutting, rearranging, and layering at least that I'm aware of. Here's a sample project...let's put me in France from a couple years back into a contemporary art exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Doing some careful cut work on this takes less than five minutes. The biggest drawback I've noticed so far is a restriction to only two layers per composition. To use any more than two, you'll have to use the computer Photoshop program.
Here's some different positions to put me in. It's fun to try expand and compress cutouts. Flipping and mirroring makes things turn out more interesting as well.
Adobe Color
This app is incredibly useful for capturing a certain mood without even dealing with shapes. It lets you save sets of five different colors taken from photos that you take. That's either from your camera roll (pictures you already took) to upload, or a live camera. It'll save any pictures from the live camera, but they're pretty bad quality so I suggest playing around with your uploaded photos later on. The app will automatically start trying to find colors to make into a theme. You can tell it to look for colorful, bright, muted, deep, or dark sets. Sometimes it gets what you want, but usually I end up self-selecting my own colors just by dragging the the dot around wherever I want. In that case, select custom. It even shows you where on the color spectrum your colors appear. The sets that I made below are all from my backyard. The first is a pile of dead leaves, the second a yellow lily, the third some pink phlox, and the last is a patch of various smaller plants shown in the other two pictures.
As you can see, you can two totally different color sets out of the same scene by moving a little bit. Going back to change any of the colors is possible as long as you save it in your library. My favorite thing to do with the sets I have saved is to use them as a reference for a complete painting, drawing, etc. Even though recreating colors isn't so easy, you'll at least have an idea in your mind for what you want, and you'll also know which combinations work and which ones don't.
Adobe Shape
If you don't care much about color but outlines are more of a priority, use Adobe Shape. Like Adobe Color, you can capture and then select pieces that you want from a photo to save for later.
The slider at the bottom lets you decide how much detail you want included in your shape. Going all the way to the right will result in lots of texture, and keeping it to the left will give you more basic lines. To get the general idea of my lovely cat slippers, I want to keep it rather simple.
With a more complex background, it might be necessary to erase the unnecessary parts. In the end, you'll get a complete shape.
I hope you give these a try just for fun. I may follow up with a review on more Adobe apps. Wishing everyone a continuously sunny summer ☼
