This is a water bottle. Kind of weird, huh? If I hadn't made this and someone showed me and had me hazard a guess, I definitely would not have guessed it was originally a water bottle.

I was bored of my previous phone wallpaper so I snapped a pic of a water cooler bottle that had beads of condensation covering the inside to see if I could tweak it and wring something interesting out of it in Photoshop. I actually won't even be able to repeat exactly what I did as it was a completely non-scientific process. Basically, it went something like this: crank up the contrast, convert to black and white, adjust the hue, up the saturation, apply a crazy filter (that gave it the cool texture), tweak the color and lighting settings a bit more, and call it macaroni. I converted it back to black and white for my wallpaper because the coloring is a little loud for my taste.

I like to make my own wallpapers. Digital ones, that is, for digital devices. I use my phone a lot for this. Since it doesn't take high quality images to begin with, it's fun to play with its weaknesses to try and turn a lame picture into something interesting to look at by taking creative license in an editing program. It's a fun challenge that gives you meaningful backgrounds. Give it a shot!

This image here is a shot I took of a large, laminated world map hanging on an office kitchen wall. I love maps, and I liked the pastel color scheme and contrasting elements in this one. The ugly fluorescent office lighting was reflecting off all the folds though and with my cheap little phone camera I definitely wasn't going to get a good raw picture. But maybe there would be an old-fashioned angle I could take with it? I used the Adobe Photoshop Express app initially to convert the image to black-and-white and add a vignette. Then I uploaded it to my computer where I upped the saturation and contrast and gave it a sepia-ish hue using Adobe Photoshop Elements. That was it. Pretty simple stuff. And now I have a new wallpaper.