Category Archives: Editing

Editing pictures on the iPhone

Adding depth of view to iPhone Photos

For film camera, you can get lenses that have a pretty close depth of field so that everything outside of the distance you focus at is out of focus. This will create an image that is very focused on a subject much like if you were there and was looking at a specific spot.

For the iPhone, you can tap a particular area you want to have in focus when you shoot the shot but does not produce a very sharp change between in/out focus areas. A enhancement to add the depth effect to an image after it is taken is commonly called Tilt Shift.

There are a few photo enhancement app for the iPhone that allows you to add that Tile Shift effect, I’ll cover those later. The issue has long been that you have to add the effect in a circle or straight line. Which means that the object you want in focus has a area around it that should be out of focus but is still in focus. Most people won’t notice it if the image is small.

I just discovered an app, Finger Focus, which allows you to highlight the area you want in focus with your finger… like finger painting. Everything else will look further away. The app includes the ability to adjust the size of the finger ‘brush’, the amount of blur in the background and the transition area between the in focus and the blurry areas.

Real HDR for the iPhone, now with enhancements

High Dynamic Range… in case you where wondering what HDR was. The built in iPhone camera app has a option to shoot in entry level version of HDR in case you thought you had seen it before. Basically, you take a over bright and over dark image and merge them together so that the bright areas aren’t too bright and the dark areas aren’t blacked out. The effect works very well for inside of buildings and puffy clouds outside. There is a lot of other situations but those are the two types of shots you see most often by professional HDR photographers.

There are a lot of ‘fake’ HDR apps for the iPhone that take a single image and bring up the darker areas and add more contrast to the brighter areas. But, side-by-side, the read HDR will win for a photo that pops.

ProHDR is a app that I use a lot when the need arrises. It can either take the bright/dark images on it’s own or I can manually override the shutter. The app is another universal app so it works on your iPhone and iPad2 (needs a camera of course). And, it works in landscape or portrait views.

New in the update today is effect you can add within ProHDR to your HDR photos. No need to snap a shot and go to anther iPhone app to add an enhancement. Now, you can crop, add a filter, add a frame and add text, then save to your iPhone’s photo library.

Multiple iPhone Photos used to create a single image

A fun app I have been using was just updated yesterday, I thought it was worth a quick mention. Diptic is a universal app (buy once, use it on both your iPhone and iPad) that provides many templates of multi image boxes. You choose one, then tap each box to insert an image from your iPhone’s library, take a new image or import from a social network. The image in the box can be rotated and resized.

The first of the new features is the ability to move the bars that frame each image so that you can adjust how much of the total image each photo will take up. No longer are you locked to a set size of each image… yea!

The second feature addition is the ability to round the corners on the over all image or of each picture within it. The Diptic developers even provided a slider so you can adjust how much of a rounded corner you need to get the right effect.

When done, export to your iPhone’s area, to an email or even directly to many different social network and photo sharing services.

Painting detail colors on iPhone Photos

An update today to ToonPaint reminded me that I should mention the features it brings to your iPhone Photos. The update included better sharing of your photo creations on Twitter and Facebook, as well the resolution was upped to match the capabilities of the iPhone4s.

The ToonPaint app can take pictures or use images from your iPhone library. Upon import, the image is converted to Black and White automatically. You can adjust the line thickness, contrast, shades of gray, etc…

Then, through the color pallet of minor options or ToonPaint’s open color picker you paint color onto images to highlight as needed. For the right picture, a bit of unique painted color is striking.

Paper photos to an online family tree using your iPhone

A family tree site is offering a free app to get your images from paper to digital. The idea is that you take a picture of the printed picture using your iPhone. The 1000memories app then lets you align the image on the iPhone so it is straight and clean. You can add text to the image as well as keywords, then upload to the online family album. So far, I have yet to see where they are charging for the iPhone app or the online service. Maybe bigger accounts of shared accounts carry an upgrade charge. I have yet to see that though.

Celebrate iPhoneography show this weekend with free Perfect Photo

An app that I play with from time-to-time is Perfect Photo. It has a nice group of filters and enhancement tools. Almost all of the tools have sliders to fine tune, which is much appreciated over lesser apps that just apply and go. The undo/redo is handy too so you can play a lot with images to get just the look your going for.

The app is from a company that does a lot of iPhone Photo apps so be forewarned that even if you had the for-pay Perfect Photo app, your going to get a lot of ads pushing you to the pro version of the app that is a touch more expensive (no discount for already paying for another one of their apps).

Photo apps that play games

I don’t mean the headline of this post as a good thing. I’m not saying that this is a iPhone photo app that is for playing games. I’m pointing out that you need to look over photo apps before you buy. The below screen shot is of several apps that are for editing photos taken with your iPhone, all listed as different apps by different developers. Yet, if you take the time to look at them, you will see a common feature set. They all have a image of a back of a camera body with a spot to see what your taking the picture of. Each has a different camera but the differences stop there. All with a very limited list of features leading off with many filters. They don’t know how many filters they put in their program?

Just take a minute to look at an app before buying, many are very limited and usually cost the same or more of the real powerhouse editing apps.

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Adding text while enhancing your iPhone Photos

There is an app I use a lot for fine tuning my images, Camera+. I like the ‘Scenes’ options that allow the tune the lighting of an image. Effects is the app’s way of saying ‘Filters’ which work well. A little known feature of Camera+ is the ability to add text to images. It is hidden a bit so it’s easy to miss or even forget when you know about it.

When viewing a image to edit, choose the ‘Borders’ option, then when you choose a ‘Frame’ you will find a ‘Captions’ button. With this feature, you can add free form text, edit location and add date or time.

Moving photo editing between apps

While working on a photo in ColorSplash, I noticed that they are supporting cross app movement of the image.

A group of iPhone photo apps are using a common method of coding that gives you the ability to edit an image in one app and share it directly with another app to continue editing. You do not need to save the image from one app to the iPhone’s Photo Library then open it with another app to continue editing. From the apps’ Share option, choose to share the image with another app. You will then be presented with a list of apps on your iPhone that support the direct movement of photos between editors. I would expect the list to grow as other developers add the free feature.