LomoPhone Purple

I dig Lomography Lomochrome Purple film. It has a really cool effect of turning greens into purples and giving an interesting aesthetic to photos. I’ve done a roll or two of Lomochrome Purple myself, but it’s not in huge supply or necessarily at an every-day-shooters price. Plus, not everybody shoots film! I know, that last part is hard to grasp, right ? What do phone photographers do when they want to add some alternative processing to their photos ? What do you do when you’re out of film but there’s a subject that would look awesome in shades of purple ?

The first thing is to grab an image, preferably one with a bunch of green in it and bring it into Snapseed. Snapseed can be downloaded in the Android and iTunes app stores, and it’s free. Once you have the file in Snapseed, you want to bring up the Curves option.

From here, let’s adjust our blue channel and drop a dot at mid-bottom of the line like this:

Next, drag it upward about 1/3 of the way over the line so it starts a curve.

Drop a second point up higher, and drag downward until you get something like this:

Now choose your red channel and repeat the steps, overlaying your red S on the blue S — you can tweak it to your tastes.

Look at that! We’re almost done. From here, we can drop the greens a tad, or adjust the contrast, brightness, even give it a vintage film vibe. Snapseed lets you do all that. When you’re done you’ll have a really interesting image.

It’s fun trying out different images to see what affect it has.

So give it a try the next time you run out of Lomochrome or if you just want to see what different photos might look like in that film. Of course, if possible, buy the film. While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, you can’t beat the real thing.