iPhoneography - Part 2, Processing Apps

by Carol H.

Oh my goodness, so much wonderful information shared in the comments section of the Part 1 post. Did you miss that one? Click HERE for the post. Be sure to read the comments by others about the capture apps they are using. Great information there!

Processing apps are like having a digital darkroom at your fingertips. You can straighten, crop, adjust exposure, contrast, and saturation. You can add blur to soften, or a filter to completely shift the image entirely. They are powerful and indispensable to the iPhoneographer.

Of course there are tons of processing apps out there and I have a number of them. Here are 3 of my current favorites:

Snapseed – This is my go-to app, often the first stop in my processing path. You can sharpen, straighten, and crop. My absolute favorite action in this app is the selective adjust. It’s awesome! With it you can choose to adjust brightness, contrast and saturation to just a portion of the image. Another fun action is tilt-shift where you can create the illusion of selective focus. It also contains actions for converting to B&W, you can create a vintage feel, create surreal effects with an action called Drama, or add a grunge effect. With so much in this app, it could be one of your most used. Also available for the Android.

PicTapGo – As of this post date, this app is only a couple of weeks old. You are probably familiar with the developers, Totally Rad, makers of the fabulous RadLab for Photoshop users. The sole purpose of this app is to provide you with a variety of filters (many of which are similar to some of RadLab’s filters), which you can adjust the strength of the filter and you can stack multiple filters to create your own recipe. If you like your recipe, you have the option to save it when you tap “go”. You can save your processed image to the camera roll, open it in a number of compatible apps, or share it to one of your social network platforms. I am rather impressed with the results. The tulip picture above was rather dark. I originally processed it in Snapseed, but when I achieved the lightness I wanted, I found that much of the texture in the petals was lost. So, went back to the original image, brought it into PicTapGo and applied 3 filters; Lights On, Montecito, and High Fives. This combination not only gave me the lightness I was looking for, but maintained the petal texture as well. This app is definitely worth checking out. I’m afraid I didn’t see that it was available for the Android. Droid users, please correct me if I’m mistaken or let us know what filter apps you like to use.
 

Image Blender – This is a powerful little app. Basically you put two images together and select a blend mode such as multiply, screen, soft light, etc… reminiscent of Photoshop. You can create effects similar to double exposures. If you are a lover of texture layers, you can layer them here. The top layer can also be resized so you can create collage-like images using the arrange tool, and with the mask tool you can erase or blend parts of the top image into your base image. If you want to add yet another layer, you can flatten what you have done (touch and hold at the top right to revel the flatten command), which will place it as a base layer and then you can add yet another layer on top. Also available for the Android.

You can use just one of these apps, or you can use multiple apps – referred to as app stacking (to be discussed in Part 4), to create your image. So, what are your favorite apps for processing? Leave a comment to let us know and show us your wonderful creations on the Focusing On Life Flickr group or on Instagram and tag #focusingonlife.

Part 3 of the iPhoneograpy series, Special Effects Apps will be posted on 3/27/13.