Gadgetory

you know in this city I see beautiful memories being made every day and they're being preserved on these nothing there's anything wrong with that it's just most people don't know how to use these devices to their highest potential okay let me help you with that in our hands we hold a magnificent piece of engineering but most people usually don't think about how to frame a shot know when to use a flash or how to apply tasteful filters technology has progressed to the point where we can no longer blame slow processors small sensors and bad lenses we can only blame ourselves luckily I can show you how I do it it all starts with capture there are certain things you can tweak with software but ultimately you need to begin with a well exposed sharp starting point I'll take a minimum of three shots for any picture I'm trying to capture sometimes many more if you've got burst mode definitely use it there are a lot of camera replacement apps available but for me the stock app is good enough for just about any situation with speed out weighing any additional functionality provided by third-party apps a stock app is accessible from almost any corner of the OS and it's gotten progressively better over the years the grid overlay is handy I usually keep it on and helps keep the rule of thirds always in the forefront of my mind now I'm a big fan of bold symmetrical lines that draw the eye towards a particular part of the image all encompassing wide-angle shots are also among my favorite as you could probably gather from watching a lot of the videos on our site the grid feature is key keeping these scenes lined up and looking clean another useful feature in stock app is the ability to lock focus and exposure by long pressing on a point in the scene disabling the auto exposure and auto focus and metering to that specific point this is important when trying to expose or focus on something that isn't the most prominent part of the image which is the default behavior of the app for more control apps like vsco cam camera plus allow you to specify different points for focus exposure in the case of camera plus twice this additional control does come in handy but it requires a few extra seconds to find and launch the app more often than not I'm able to get the stock app to expose the way I'd like using exposure and focus lock the iPhone 5s has one of the best image sensors of any phone but the latitude or the range between the darkest and brightest points of the image is still limiting factor this becomes obvious when shooting a high contrast scene the most common example is a bright sky blowing out when exposed for details in the ground below this is where HDR comes in by combining multiple exposures into a single composite image you can effectively increase the available range of the image sensor it's a technique used everywhere from mobile photography to digital cinema some use it as an art form itself but I prefer to use it subtly stock HDR is handing the pinch if I need to quickly capture a scene where I'm forced to make a trade-off between exposing for the subject and exposing for the background I'll hit the HDR button and exposed to the subject this can save blown out windows and skies while maintaining proper exposure on the subject and if I've got a few extra seconds and there's little movement in the scene a much better option is a third-party app called Pro HDR this allows you to select two individual exposure points I choose two points that are not quite the brightest and darkest parts of the image so it doesn't look over processed to fake the app then captures both images back-to-back and immediately combine them you can then make tweaks saturation contrast and brightness of the final composite I try to get as flattened image as possible so it's more flexible in the processing stage Pro HDR will also combine images from the camera roll so if you deliberately capture the same frame with two different exposure points you can put together an HDR image after the fact if you combine this with an app like Auto stage you can put together some pretty amazing HDR panorama --zz my next step is processing over the past few years I've gone through countless photo apps on multiple platforms on a quest for the perfect photo workflow I went through a photo forge - and picture show power combo phase then I was really into swang collab for its unique filters and noir photo for black and white shots by bouncing between multiple apps I was able to overcome their individual weaknesses but I was left endlessly importing and exporting images to my camera roll luckily though an app is a merge that combines great photo editing tools with fantastic filter options for now my go-to app is vsco cam i'm a big fan of visco cams library tool this allows me to bulk import photos from the camera roll quickly swipe between them to judge with the shots flag the ones I'd like to process and then bulk delete the ones I don't once I've settled on the shot I dive directly into the photo editing tools leaving the filter selection for later I'd like to get my image on a good baseline before stylizing vsco cam has over a dozen tools available each with the strength adjustable slider the key here is moderation the images here are really compressed and you can only push them so far before they fall apart and become noisy I usually start with the sharpen tool one or two points in this tool can really make a photo pop and if you've missed the focus a bit somewhere in the 4 to 6 range can help you fake it you can usually get away with it on mobile just keep in mind that is your sharpening the image you're also sharpening the noise from there I'll push my exposure a point or two in either direction if needed I find this tool to be particularly susceptible to noise when adjusting it in either direction too much you can just make it look ugly if a shot is overexposed sometimes the best treatment is to just roll with it given the right filter you can lend some drama to an otherwise dull image from there I jump into the color temperature adjustment dragging the left or right moves the images overall temperature to be warmer or cooler my personal preference is to keep things a bit cooler the deserts mean this can also come in handy if you're under some ugly fluorescent lights between the temperature tool and a tint tool I usually strive to get skin tones as accurate as possible I also lean on the highlight save tool which reduces the brightest parts of the image only you can never really get the detail back from blowing out highlights but it can help make the effect less John like I said before though just letting it go can be kind of cool the vignette tool is basic but it does help draw the eye to the center of the image it's also one of the most overused tricks in the book and I constantly have to stop myself from Vinny adding every single shot I take but it can come in handy vsco cam has the best filters I've ever used on a mobile app they range from subtle to dramatic and each allows you to adjust them like the editing tools on a scale of 1 to 12 I have no real rule of thumb for selecting a filter but I generally try to find presets that complement the environment you wish the shop to take it personally I'm a fan of the levi's presets as well as b1 and d5 for black and white shots once I settled on a filter I'll head back to the editing tools and make any final tweaks usually I'll reduce the contrast a bit or dial down the saturation after that it's a simple process to export the shots back to the camera roll or to apps like Facebook Instagram or Twitter on occasion with the right shot adding fake depth of fields can really make an image stand out fortunately the way most people go about doing this is using instagrams circle focus filter which always looks bad using an app called big lens I'm able to selectively trace around the subject I'd like to keep in focus the program will then automatically generate a mask and blur the background from there I can fine-tune the background blur as well as unblurred the subjects I always use the lowest blur strength setting in fact I wish there was a lower setting a small amount of blurring there's a long way I should also know that there's a high potential of this image little Mike garbage so be careful once I've captured processed and shared my images with the world it's time to back them up clear them off my device some people chase inbox zero I chase camera roll zero there's no perfect solution for photo storage right now but I found a good balance between Google Plus for full resolution backups of every single photo I take regardless of whether I process it in Flickr for just the photos I consider finished it's refreshing to have a spot for my finished photos that isn't among a sea of receipts so this is my process for making photos in iOS it's not perfect it's always changing and it's only one of a million possible ways to do it but it works for me