App Photo Editing- Day 3: Last Day Blur

Hello Everybody!

Happy New Year! I am so sorry that I haven't been on here for the longest time! I hope that everyone had a lovely New Year and is enjoying 2017 so far.

Alright, on with the post. The past couple of posts, I've used techniques from chapter one (masking) and chapter five (toon looks) from Dan Marcolina's book "iPhone Obsessed: Photo Editing Experiments with Apps". In this book, chapter four is all about the impact of blurring a picture and making it a vignette. I wanted to find a picture that I would want to edit and frame in my room as if it was taken and edited in a studio. As I was on the hunt looking through old pictures I found one from the last day of school last year. It's a picture of my best friends and me:

Before I continue, I'd like to thank the people pictured above for letting me use this for my blog. Thanks! Anyways, in a bit of an introduction to this chapter the author states, "Blurring an image can make it more effective. Because mobile phones start out being a bit soft, it is easy to make a blur effect seem natural. The effect also gives the shot a dreamy quality, which allows for a more symbolic interpretation" (Marcolina 44). With this in mind, I knew that I wanted to capture this with my editing.

I currently have an Apple iPhone 5C which is the device used for the editing. For this experiment, the author took an image of a Night-Blooming Cereus (certain "The Bean Trees"  connection there *wink wink*). Ahem, back to the post. The author took an image of a Night-Blooming Cereus and he used editing with soft window light and a little bit of color saturation which allowed the tiered plant to have new life (Marcolina 46). I wanted to recreate what he had done using the same technique. He only used two apps for this experiment which sort of surprised me. The first one was Photoshop Express which is free on the app store. Secondly was TiltShift. I was a bit on edge with downloading this app because it's $1.99 on the app store, but I knew it would help me in the future so I purchased it.

The first step is to use Photoshop Express to "Brighten using exposure and saturation along with slight sharpening" (Marcolina 46). Within the app, I did three things. First of all, I set the exposure of the picture to 20. Then I sharpened it to 25. Finally, I increased the saturation to 10. This is the final product of that:

The second and final step is to use TiltShift and using the circular blur visual guide to focus on what you want to enhance in the image. He then pushed the edges of the image into oblivion by using Gauss blur along with saturation and brightness (Marcolina 46). Within the app, I used the tools (shown below) to edit my image. The red circle you see in the image on the right is the visual guide used to show the area that will remain clear. As Marcolina did, I also used the Gauss blur. Firstly, I set the blur to 3. Under the "Slider currently controls" panel, this is the first option. Secondly, I set the saturation to 1.15. Under the "Slider currently controls" panel, this is the second option. Thirdly, I set the contrast to 1.05. This is the third option under the "Slider currently controls" panel. Finally, I increased the brightness to 1.05. As you might have guessed, this is the final option under the panel.

After this entire process, this is the result I had:

Through this experiment, I have expanded my knowledge in a couple of ways. First of all, I am now aware of how to use just some of the features of a brand new app. This can benefit me in the future if I ever need that app again. I've also learned how just blurring a picture can give a completely different vibe versus a plain picture. Although it didn't turn out exactly the way I planned, I still am satisfied with the result :).

Here's the final process:

I apologize for the image going off the page but I want to show the entire process so there's no stopping that... Oh my gosh! Only two more posts left! Is there anything you think I should've done differently for this experiment?