How to Clean a Fingerprint on Your iPad
It has been a long time since I made a video about cleaning fingerprints, and such a lot has changed since then, I thought it was time to do an update.
When Covid hit and changed our lives in so many ways, the hardest thing for so many people was that they were not able to travel and be close to their loved ones. Thank heavens things have improved now and I’m glad we can move around once more, but in many cases it is still hard to get a direct fingerprint when people are far away.
Using a Photopolymer Plate
By using alternative methods it is still possible to get a fingerprint and because you’ll be using a Photopolymer plate you can even make multiple pieces of jewellery of the same print.
This is something I did when making my Mum’s fingerprint into various pieces of jewellery and a keyring for my siblings, and a few small pieces for some of her grandkids as well, it is such a lovely way to remember her, with a unique piece of personalised jewellery.
In my book ‘How to Make Fingerprint Jewelry’ I go into the whole process of transferring a print that has been made with an Inkless Wipe, or with a stamp pad, or even just using a very soft graphite pencil and then preparing it to make a perfect Photopolymer plate.
Technology to the rescue
Luckily technology has come a long way as well and with all the apps available on our devices the process of cleaning up a print, ready to use with a Photopolymer plate, is now a piece of cake!
In this demo I’ve used two apps on my iPad and one on my phone. These are apps that I am very familiar with, but you could easily substitute your own favourite apps.
Pixelmator
Pixelmator is an image editing app. You could use any photo editor that has these standard basic functions:
Cropping
Brightness & Contrast
Levels
Adobe Capture
Adobe Capture is a free app that lets you do many cool things to give you quick and artistic effects on your phone:
Making colour palettes
Colour gradients
Create a brush from anything you point your phone at
Create a geometric pattern in real-time just by taking a shot with your phone of something you like.
And much more…
The function I used in the app during the tutorial is called ‘Shapes’ and it basically creates a Black and White image from anything you point your phone’s camera at. And if you have an Adobe account you can upload your images to Creative Cloud and have them accessible on all your devices.
Do yourself a favour and take some time to play with this app, chances are you’ll love it as much as I do, be warned though, hours pass without you noticing!
Click here to see all the fun things this amazing app has to offer!
Procreate
Procreate is my favourite painting app. Here again, you can substitute any of your own favourite painting apps, especially if you’re on an Android device because Procreate is on the iPad only at the time of this writing. Just about any painting app will work, this technique does not require anything but the very basics:
Adjustable Painting and Eraser Brushes
A way to invert the image to make the finished print into a negative
I use Alpha Lock to preserve transparency in the demo, which is a workaround to achieve the same effect.
In this demo I’m using fingerprints that were taken with a graphite pencil
see my video on that here
Then I took a good photo with my phone using a tripod to ensure a sharp image. If you don’t have a late-model phone, use a camera or scan the prints at a resolution of 1200 dpi, this will give you a good starting point. Send the print at full resolution to your iPad and take it from there.
I hope this tutorial will help make things easier and quicker for your jewellery creation workflow, enjoy! 😊
