California Streaming
Yosemite National Park’s Tenaya Lake is featured in Apple’s latest invite.
The invites for the next Apple event went out on Tuesday, September 07, featuring a stunning nighttime landscape of what appears to be Tenaya Lake in Yosemite National Park in California, with a floating outline of a glowing Apple logo transposed on top and reflected in the water beneath.
The banner image for Apple’s September 14, 2021 California Streaming Event.
I wanted to create a wallpaper of the invites landscape but sans the Apple logo, a process that, given my rudimentary editing skills, became more complicated and ingenious than I was expecting.
First, I downloaded the image from Apple's event page, which gave me a 2880x1996 image to work with. Next, I opened up Pixelmator, used ML to denoise the image, and then ML to scale it to a 6K resolution.
Following those steps, I began working on using the repair tool to try to remove the Apple Logo from the image itself. While it was easy enough to remove the logo from the gradient sky with a few passes of the repair tool, I had a more challenging time with the lake itself. Every time I went to try to remove the glowing blue reflection from the surface, I found the tranquil waters would get blurred and muddled no matter how I wanted to approach it. I had to improvise.
I had a difficult time with getting the repair tool to cleanly remove the blue glow from the waters without muddling up the water.
And by improvise, I mean entirely remake the bottom half of the image. This process involved taking the top half of the image, duplicating it, and mirroring it underneath the landscape. I then added a minor bloom effect and a slight gaussian & motion blur to give the subtle effect of being slightly distorted by the water. Finally, I finish off the mirrored effect with a circular black vignette and overlaying a slight ripple texture for added realism.
A comparison of the water in Apple’s invite image (left) contrasted with the complete remake I did for this wallpaper (right).
The final two modifications involved adding a star field to the image and desaturating the hills near the centre of the image from any of their remaining blue glow from the Apple logo that had previously been there. And voila! California Steaming wallpaper done and ready in time for Tuesday's Apple Event.
California Streaming Event Wallpaper
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Mac (up to 6K) | iPhone | iPad
It’s been interesting to see the wallpaper being used in many contexts, including some high profile accounts without apparently noticing that significant parts of the image (stars, reflection, ripples), are all heavily modified from the original invite.
