Best Gadget Sense » Photo

John Paul Caponigro: Create Complex Grunge Photo FX With GothPix

Sylvie — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:16:13 +0000

Splatter, speckle, and stain your images in seconds with the iPhone app Goth Pix. It generates surprisingly rich and complex weathering effects that can give your images an antique, distressed, or painterly look.

Goth Pix is extremely simple to use. There are only two controls. Splatter can be turned On or Off. Intensity controls the degree of the effect. (The Intensity slider is not dynamic and does not control the effect after you apply it. You’ll need to set Intensity before generating the effect.)

You can get finished results in as few as six simple steps.

1 Select an image to distress from Album or take a new one with Camera.
2 Press edit.
3 Turn Splatter On or Off.
4 Adjust the degree of the effect with Intensity.
5 Press Preview. (Wait for it. It takes a few seconds to generate the effect.)
6 When you get an effect you like, press Save.
7 If you want to try again, press Undo and then press Preview again.

This rich and complex effect randomly produces different results every time. (More accurately, there are a series of textures and toned areas that are layered at varying opacities that seem to be influenced by the tonal values they overlay, so you may get a few repeated patterns.) If you get an effect you like, save it; you may not be able to get it again. Don’t worry. This won’t replace your original file. It will simply generate a new file from your original.

GothPix converts color images to black and white when the effect is applied. It would be even better if it offered an option to preserve an image’s original color. If you want to get the original color in an image back, you can blend GothPix’s distressed black and white image with the original color image. Blend two versions of an image with another app, like Image Blender. Once the two images are blended, you can adjust color further by reducing or increasing saturation with another app. You can combine the effects of several apps to create the final result you’re looking for. What’s more, you can do all of this in just a minute or two, though the app does take longer than most to generate its effects.

It would take me a considerable amount of time to generate equivalent results in Photoshop. In fact, I wish I had this filter in Photoshop.

Follow John Paul Caponigro on Twitter:

www.twitter.com/jpcaponigro

Gadgetwise Blog: Photo Apps Move to the Desktop

hotgadgets — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 01:13:58 +0000

Photoshop may be the most powerful photo touch-up software, but it isn’t the simplest to use. And the simplest ones? They’re not so powerful.

But photo-software makers are releasing products that fall between the two. Some are stand-alone versions of programs most often used to add features to Photoshop, called plug-ins. Others are upgraded versions of phone or tablet photo apps.

Among the most recent releases are two higher-powered versions of well-known phone and tablet apps, CameraBag and Snapseed.

A control panel from CameraBag 2.

CameraBag became best known as an app that adds visual effects to smartphone photos, like making a picture look as though it had been taken with a Holga toy camera. But a desktop version called CameraBag 2 for the Mac and PC does a lot more using similar controls. Instead of just adding effects, it lets you customize those effects and even simplifies color and exposure corrections.

For beginners, the simple way to use CameraBag 2 is “Quicklooks,” which shows examples of how the photo you took will look if you use the more than 100 filters and controls, like exposure and contrast, as well as more advanced controls like luminance curves.

Once you have used one of the controls or effects, a box appears under the picture with the name of each filter or control you’ve used. That way you can remove anything in a single step, or go back and further adjust that step.

You can finish your work off with a border, such as one that makes your photo look as if it were a 35 mm slide in a white paper mount.

The program isn’t quite as easy as it might be. There are a lot of different ways you can get to the same effects panel, which can make it confusing to remember how you got there. It also lacks a “save” button, instead requiring you to go to a menu, pick a size and rename the files to save them.

The desktop app is priced at $ 29 online, currently discounted to $ 24. A Mac-only version through the Mac App store is $ 24, currently discounted to $ 19.

Snapseed, the phone and tablet version of software from Nik, best known for its Photoshop plug-ins, is also being offered in a Mac desktop version.

In some ways it has fewer options and controls than the CameraBag product, but there is one important difference. Snapseed has a feature called “control points,” which let you apply touch-ups to selected areas of a photo, instead of the whole picture. So you might choose to lighten a shadow on a subject’s face, while leaving the rest of the photo moodily lit. The best way to learn to use them is by watching the videos on Nik’s site.

Snapseed also lets you make color corrections, add prefabricated effects like the gritty-looking “grunge” or apply selected amounts of effects like tilt-shift or vignetting.

Another nice touch — you can adjust the thickness of the borders around photos, as well as the effect within the frame. So with a border that has a light leak, you can increase the size of the leak or decrease it.

Photos can be loaded directly to Facebook or Flickr or shared by e-mail. Snapseed is $ 20 through the Mac App store.

iPhone Obsessed: Photo editing experiments with Apps

Justa — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:38:36 +0000

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Find More Iphone Apps Products

WATCH: Whose Photo Does Kathy Griffin Use On Her Fake Grindr Profile?

Justa — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:15:23 +0000

In her latest special on Bravo, Kathy Griffin revealed her obsession with the popular gay social networking app Grindr

“I know I’m a little late to this party, but if straight women could figure this out, it would be so great,” Griffin gushes. “They tell you exactly where available gays are for whatever you f**king want…why didn’t we think of this, girls?”

The outspoken comedian and LGBT rights advocate is so fascinated by the app, she says she’s created a fake profile using a shirtless snapshot of one popular boy band member as her image. Find out who it is!

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Best Gadget Sense » Photo

John Paul Caponigro: Create Complex Grunge Photo FX With GothPix

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Gadgetwise Blog: Photo Apps Move to the Desktop

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iPhone Obsessed: Photo editing experiments with Apps

Click Here For iPhone Obsessed: Photo editing experiments with Apps - Special Discounts

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WATCH: Whose Photo Does Kathy Griffin Use On Her Fake Grindr Profile?

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