iphone - Semantically driven

Editing photos on the iPhone with Snapseed

June 21, 2012 by Jen

I’ve recently acquired an iPhone photo app called Snapseed. It’s brilliant, and is currently my favourite iPhone photo app besides Hipstamatic.

Below I’ll show three photos I took using the iPhone in camera app, and what I did with them using Snapseed. The options I wrote down aren’t anywhere near exact, or step-by-step because I can’t remember exactly what I did.

Using the app is very intuitive and there’s loads of different things you can do that seem to go beyond with other apps like Camera+ and Instagram do. For example within the filters it has there are a huge amount of options and you can spend ages playing around fine tuning your photo and this is why there’s no step-by-step because it’s a matter of trial and error. While editing these photos a second time which you’ll see below, I still kept finding options I didn’t know were there.

It’s a bit more pricey than other photo apps I’ve bought but I managed to snaffle it for free and I knew it was for free by adding to my wishlist on AppShopper.

Below is the out of camera shot of a thirteen year old’s birthday cake.

Below is the altered shot. I mainly changed the brightness, contrast and saturation, and added a border. These are all things I could have done in Photoshop, but I find I do a lot of my editing of photos while going to and from work on the bus now.

Below is an experiment using the grunge filter.

Below was a shot of the last leaves of autumn when I was out for my early morning walk/run and it had been raining.

Below is the edited photo which I cropped so the focus was the actual leaves. I changed the colour a bit too – they’re a bit more earthy.

Re-edited in Snapseed using the vintage and grunge filters (more vintage than grunge I think).

It was a bit of a dreary day when I took the photo below and I wanted to give it some pizazz.

This is the after Snapseed edit of the above photo. I’ve played with the saturation to make the sky a bit more interesting.

Re-edited using Center focus and Grunge filters – quite a different feel to the photo.

I find now that I have this app, I’m using the camera app more and editing them using Snapseed rather than shooting in Hipstamatic nearly all the time which I’ve been in the habit of doing.

Remember to drink plenty of water

July 27, 2011 by Jen

Wednesday, 20 July 2011, Day 239/365.

I try to remember to drink as much water as possible during the day. I have a glass of water at my side and when it’s empty it’s a good excuse to get away from the computer to go and fill it up.

On the weekends when I’m not at work this routine goes out the window and I might get to the end of the day and realise I’ve hardly drank anything.

I used the iPhone camera+ app to take the above photo. It’s kind of similar to Instagram except the end resulting photos are in a higher resolution which I like.

365 project – a photo a day

November 29, 2010 by Jen

I have always watched with interest people starting and some finishing a photo a day challenge. I decided I’d do it once I got my new phone with web capabilities and I finally got it one week ago. It’s been eight days and I haven’t forgotten to take a photo per day yet.

Below are days 1-7. You can follow my progress on Flickr. So far all the photos I’ve taken have been with the iPhone using the Hipstamatic app. My only beef with the Hipstamatic app is that what you see isn’t what you get with the framing of the picture so it can be a bit hit and miss.

I’d just installed the app while JJ was writing a story. He’s right into writing at the moment. He even wrote something the other day and let me correct his spelling and re-wrote it. His spelling needs some work.

This was taken on our morning walk and it’s at our local oval usually used for sport, but you’re still allowed to let your dog off the lead here so long as organised sport isn’t being played and so long as you pick up its poo and keep it under control. My dog is deaf now so if she wanders off and I call her she can’t hear me. I have to get in front of her face and wave my arms to get her attention these days.

This was taken on my way to a seminar on North Terrace in Adelaide. I’ve taken a similar photo using my DSLR.

I obviously didn’t take this one. This is on our morning walk yet again.

We had our work christmas dinner the other night so I took a few using the Hipstamatic app (this is one) and some without. The iPhone 4 camera works pretty well – I like it.

This is The Surfer near his camper trailer that he sold the other day. We showed the people who ended up buying it how to put up the tent part. I’ve only done that twice now and really can’t remember that well what to do so I pretended I knew what I was doing while trying to make it look really easy. The people who bought it seemed really nice so I hope they enjoy it. The Surfer has bought a camper van to use instead of this which is why he sold it.

I ended up choosing this one for day 7 because JJ looks so so happy here. He’d been quite annoying this day after a really good day on Saturday… He was probably really happy because he was going to have his favourite fish and chips for dinner. We’d just been to pick up my sister from the airport.

And that’s my first week of daily photos. I’ll do an outtakes version I reckon because there’s some other good photos that I didn’t choose for the daily photo. I couldn’t say what my criteria are really, but it’s partly a document of my day-to-day life I guess.

Have you done a photo a day project or point to people you know of who have?

iPad – I tried to play

August 31, 2010 by Jen

photo: Yutaka Tsutano

I started my new job nearly four weeks ago and one of the perks was that I get to play with the office iPad. Like a kid with a new toy I took it home at the end of last week after a short tutorial from my colleague.

The experience left me a bit disillusioned though. Let me explain.

I could logout of my colleague’s Facebook and Twitterific accounts and login as myself. Facebook played nicely but Twitterific still had my colleague’s tweets on there until mine started taking over. I did find a way to clear the cache – not that any of mine, or hers, are sensitive and we follow each other anyway.

But when it came time to update the applications I couldn’t because it wouldn’t let me logout of her iTunes account and login as myself.

iPad, as I discovered the hard way, is not multi-user.

After that I couldn’t be bothered adding any other apps because I didn’t want to spend half my Sunday night finding out how to log out of them.

I’m still to get my iPhone – long story – but I imagine they’re quite similar which I don’t see as a problem. But an iPhone is less likely to be shared. Sure, your kids might play some games on it but it’s fairly unlikely they’ll be using the same applications like Facebook, email, and so on, as you are.

iPad, on the other hand, I think is more likely to be shared. Come on Apple, multi-user would be nice.

I’m not alone in sharing this thought according to MacWorld and macenstein