TouchRetouch
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One iPhone photographer's workflow
One great way to learn how to take and process better photographs is to learn from professionals, and for many of us time and circumstance precludes dropping everything to do an internship with a professional photographer. Fortunately, there are pros like Jessie Webster -- who runs the "Sweet Thing" blog -- who are kind enough to share their photography workflows with the world and help make our photographs better. In a classic post from July 30, 2013, Jessie outlined her photo editing process for Instagram. Yeah, I know -- I was thinking "a process for an Instagram photo?" too. But that's what spells out the difference between a professional photographer and someone taking snapshots with an iPhone. Jessie started with a self-portrait taken with TimerCam (free or US$1.99 for the pro version) and then ran it through VSCO Cam (free) to add a filter, lighten, straighten and crop the photo. Next, she moved the photo to Afterlight ($0.99) to add clarity and sharpen the image. Finally, the image passed into Touch Retouch ($0.99) to remove some distracting foreground rocks and sticks before being uploaded to Instagram (free). Be sure to check out Jessie's tutorial on Sweet Thing for more details.
Daily iPhone App: TouchRetouch
If you're a Photoshop user, you're likely aware of the editor's new "content-aware" tools that let you magically replace or erase items in your photos. iPhone users who want a similar tool on their handset should take a look at TouchRetouch by Adva-Soft. TouchRetouch is a simple tool that lets you highlight an object in a photo and either erase it or clone it in a few easy steps. The app lets you load an image or grab one with your camera. Once you have the photo opened, you can zoom in on the object you want to remove or clone. You can use the brush or lasso tool to select the object and the eraser to tidy up your selection. There's a zoom window in the corner of your image that helps you fine tune your selection. If you make a mistake, there's an undo and redo. Once your object is selected, you can click the "Start" button to remove it. The app works best on objects that are small and not too close to other objects. A perfect example is the photograph of my yard, shown above, that I took after a day of light flurries. It's a nice winter shot that's marred by an unsightly tote in the yard. It took me less than five minutes to highlight the tote, remove it and save the image shown below. If you look closely at the image below, I also removed two snow statues built by my children. You can see some slight blurring where they were removed. For the record, those were not unsightly. I just wanted to see how well the app performed. Overall, TouchRetouch is a nice companion app for digital photographers. It's not as robust as Photoshop's content-aware tools, but it's perfect for a mobile device. It's lightweight and does a decent job removing items from a photo, but it's not perfect. At times, the app crashed and I had to restart. Other times, it slowed and I had to close the app and re-open it. When you re-open the app, it saves your progress, so you start right where you left off. These glitches usually occurred when I loaded up the full resolution image. When I worked with a lower resolution picture, the performance was improved. If you've got 99-cents in your pocket and you take lots of photos, TouchRetouch is worth grabbing from the iOS App Store. It does a suitable job removing unwanted items in photos, especially those casual snapshots you want to send your friends or upload to Instagram.
TouchRetouch: A powerful photo retouching app for the iPhone and iPad
Do you have photos on your phone that need a little 'help' without going back to your Mac for iPhoto clean up or Photoshop work? It happens to me all the time, and TouchRetouch for US$0.99 gives you some powerful tools to remove defects, people or objects from photos with only a little effort. It is especially nice when you are on an outing or vacation and want to get some photos emailed to friends or uploaded to a sharing site, but the photos aren't as perfect as you would like. TouchRetouch lets you load an image from your camera roll, and using your fingers, either draw a lasso around the offending part of the photo or use a brush to highlight it. Using some smart software, the object or person will be removed, while the background is intelligently filled in. It's similar to Content Aware Fill on the new Photoshop CS5, but this app costs a lot less money. The software has unlimited undo, and you can erase all or portions of the mask that you create. When you're done, you can save the photo back to your camera roll or email it directly from within the app. The app also supports sharing on Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Twitter TouchRetouch has built-in video tutorials and a clone tool to repair parts of an image that the retouching process doesn't fix perfectly. %Gallery-121452%
