digital poetry: Wallpapers From Mobile Pictures

Say goodbye to plain desktop wallpapers taken from your mobile phone. With a few steps, you can turn that dull desktop you'd like to cover up with apps into something you'd like to frame.

Take a snapshot of your favorite subject or choose a photo from your huge library of cellphone/digital pictures. In my case, I chose this (not so glamorous) shot of myself to demonstrate how a dull, unattractive (to some), picture can turn your desktop into something worthwhile to look at.

Fire up your favorite image editor and make some adjustments (levels, brightness/contrast, curves) to fine-tune the brightness and overall exposure of your image to the look you want for your desktop. Don't forget to do this all on a duplicate layer so that you can undo your mistakes. For this particular project, I chose a darker, subdued, and slightly reddish look to go with my plan on making the background red (plus my shirt is red in this image).

Once that is done, use the pen tool (or your favorite crop tool) to draw a mask around the face so we only select the part of the photo we want on the foreground. Put this on a separate layer.

Before we can smooth out the skin for that "magazine model look," we have to remove the major imperfections (like that garish mole on my nose). We can do this easily using the Healing Brush tool in Photoshop or your favorite editor. take care not to remove too much lest you end up looking like a picture-perfect alien.

Next, once the major blemishes are taken care of, it's time to smooth out the wrinkles and close the PORES. We do this by once again duplicating the image layer and applying a low-power, low-opacity median filter to our face. This smoothens out the complexion quite a bit so I emphasize low-power, low-opacity (These are not options. What I mean is you lower the median effect radius and the layer opacity until you achieve the desired level of smoothness to your skin). Use the Liquefy filter to modify the shape of your face. Slight modifications work fine, like the one i did to shrink my nose. Don't change your face too much or no one will know it's you.

Select the original image layer and duplicate it. To the bottom duplicate, we apply a Gaussian Blur filter, and to the upper one apply a pixelate -> mosaic filter for the pixelated look. Draw a gradient mask from black to white on the upper layer to show only half of the pixelated layer and show the bottom blurred layer beneath it.

Lastly, apply an HSL (Hue/Saturation/Lightness) adjustment to the two layers we just used. I colorized the two layers to a deep, dark red that it the look I wanted for my image.