Once Upon a Color Story…

Want to get beautiful effects on your photos?

I have been recently using the app A Color Story a lot. A Color Story was created by A Beautiful Mess and focuses on bright colors.

These are some pros:

• Easy to use
• Works well with iPhone photos
• Free to download with options for free and paid filters
• Easy to layer different filters
• Bright color styles make your photos stand out
• Good for blog photos
• Option to save editing steps

I liked a lot of things about this app. The main thing I love is the bright, colorful and modern style of the filters that is different from filters on Instagram and other apps which usually aim to give your photos a more vintage look. The filters are similar to the A Beautiful Mess actions and I love that you can save the steps you took for each filter so you can edit multiple photos with the same filter pattern easily.

These are some of the cons of this app:

• The effects don’t work as well with non iPhone photos
• Could offer more free filters
• Bright color style might not suit everyone

I think the editing and filters fit well on blogs and the web. They might not work as well for other photos. I tried on a couple photos I didn’t take on my phone and I didn’t like the effects of the bright filters as much. Sometimes, it was too much of an overkill. I liked the effects on phone photos and old photos though.

Here are some examples of photos I edited and how they turned out.

I started with a simple photo of a plant.  The first thing I do when working with a photo is to crop it and adjust brightness and contrast.

This is the photo after I played with the color a little. It has a sort of soft look now.

I thought the filters looked a little dark  so I also tried this style where I made it more green. I can’t remember what filters I used, but I like how it turned out. Here is another example: 

I liked this rose photo I took in my

neighborhood. I cropped it and then brightened it and played with colors.

Next time, I would recommend adjusting the filters and colors little by little (instead of turning a filter all the way up, just do it a quarter or a half way). You should also layer filters to get different effects.

Let me know which photo you like the best. Have you ever used A Color Story?