iphone apps for photographers {30}

Saturday, January 29, 2011

iphone apps for photographers {30}

Hey! usually I (Amy) am the one posting blogs, but today I have a guest post from my tech savvy hubby Tavis!

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If you are anything like me, you probably have thousands of photos on your phone. What now? My philosophy is that you should always strive to take a good picture, but then edit it to make it great. Today I'll share with you all of my favorite iphone applications that can transform your cell phone photography into great works of art.

TiltShifGen

This app gives you the ability to take control over where the focus is in a picture. Just like a real tilt-shift lens you are able to manipulate the DOF. Although it's fake DOF it's still a fun app to add a little something to a seemingly normal iphone picture.

Pano

Pano is a great app for when you want to capture more than what one picture can show you. Because our human eye has a field of view of 95 degrees, we naturally want to take a picture of everything we see. This app helps bridge the gap and stitches pictures together creating a panoramic view.

ColorSplash

As a photographer detail is everything. To put it simply I LOVE COLOR, but I also appreciate the power of black and white. One of the reasons black & white photos can be so powerful is because you are able to let the viewer not be distracted or led by color. Your eye has a better chance to find the detail it is looking for. This app gives you the ability to have the best of both worlds.

PS Express

It's essentially a basic version of Photoshop. It's strongest features in my opinion are:
1. Crop (Easiest I've used so far)
2. Black & White (Doesn't change the brightness and contrast like others)
3. Sharpen (Easy to go overboard, but useful)

It also has preset effects, but they all seem cheesy or easy to reproduce myself manually.

Sunrise & Set

I love this app! Light is everything in photography. That is why this app is king. We have so many meetings where we are setting up photo shoots sometimes 6 months in advance and we need to know what time to start the shoot. With this app I can always get the sunset pictures I want without having to wait hours because I didn't know what time it was going to set.

Best Camera

Chase Jarvis is definitely a photographer I look up to. He created this app a few years ago and it is another favorite of mine. Of all the apps I have used with filters, this one dose a good job of adding the filter or effect and not subtracting away from the photo quality.

PhotoMarkr

This app adds your logo and name to any photo on your phone. So when you upload that iphone picture that blows your socks off you can credit yourself. It also helps a picture look a bit more professional even though it is just a cell phone picture.

iMovie

imovie is a great app to use when you want to quickly edit video clips and photos together.

Pro HDR

I use this application the most. This app takes two pictures of different exposures and merges them together to create a High Dynamic Range picture. It also has what I think is the most powerful Brightness/Contrast controls. The reason for this is because they put them both on sliders right next to each other so you can really refine your picture quickly and in real time. I also use this app to edit a single picture using its "Library" mode, because of how easy it is to change the properties of the picture. If I could only have one photography app it would be this one.

Also keep in mind that ill often use multiple apps to obtain the look I want for the picture. Here are a few images that I've taken with my iphone and edited them using the apps above. These images are straight out of my phone and I have not used any other software other than the applications listed