Telling stories with Adobe Spark Page

- Hey, welcome back to another episode of Mobile Photography Weekly, I'm Seán Duggan. This week, I want to show you a really cool app that will let you created web-based stories or articles from your photographs. It's part of the Adobe Spark family of apps called Adobe Spark Page. Let's check it out. I'm going to my Adobe group here, and it's this one right here, Adobe Spark Page. So, when you first open up the app, it'll take you to this Inspiration page, and these are projects that other people have created using this app.

And you can scroll through these and it's really useful to check out how other people are using it, because it'll give you some ideas, and you'll see how they're able to use it to tell their stories or present their articles in really innovative ways. Of course, if you wanted to start a project from scratch, just tap the plus button. I'm going to go into the My Pages section here to start with a couple of projects that I have in progress. What I'm going to do is just deconstruct them and talk about how you can add different components.

Alright, so here it is, you can see I've got a cover photo, and I have a title. This was commemorating a visit I made to an ostrich farm in central California. And as I scroll up through here, you can see that there's text elements, photos come sliding in, so, really interesting, captions overlay over the photos. But there's one thing I need to fix right off the bat and that is the fact that this photograph, you can't see the ostrich. He's a little bit off center there. So, if I just tap there, of course I could get rid of this photo, add a new one, but then there's this option here for a focus point, so let me just tap on Focus Point, and this lets me control where the focus point of the image is.

So, I can control how it's going to land on the page and it's also giving me a little preview up here of what it would look like in the Landscape format, which is how you're going to be interacting with Adobe Spark pages on a computer. So, that looks good there, I'm just going to tap Done now that I've fixed that. And that's an option you have for any photograph you place in an Adobe Spark Page. So, to add text, all you have to do is tap on this plus symbol here.

Every once in while, you'll see a plus symbol. That just means that's a place where you could add a new component. So, if we do a tapping on that, you can see I can add a photo, text, I could add a button with a hyperlink attached to it if I want people to be able kind of have a call to action, it'll take them to another website. An embedded video that's hosted on another service. I can do a photo grid or something called a photo glide, and that's where you add photos and they just sort of seamlessly blend together and it looks very, very elegant.

So, very, very cool. If you want to add a caption here, you can do that. You can add captions anywhere. You can add these photo glides, you can change the justification of things. So, it's really, really versatile. So, here's one of these photo glides coming by here. You see how it's zooming by here. Then these floating things that you see here, if you don't put anything in here, it won't show, but you could tap there and add a photo in there.

Let's just actually add a photo in there really quick. You could add text, you could add a button with a hyperlink. So, it's pretty versatile. And let's just put this guy in here. So, you can see how this photo's going to show up here as a little overlay on top of that. Now, if you want to preview how this is going to look without any of the buttons here, just tap the preview icon there. It'll render it out, you can see what it's going to look like like that.

Of course, it does look very different once you get it onto the computer, because the computer's going to be horizontal. Let me close the preview here. Once you get ready to share it, just tap the share button, and you can assign it a category, you could say whether it is going to be public, whether it's going to be noticed by Adobe and featured on the Inspiration page. But let me just come over here to the computer, because I want to show you, just very briefly, how you can interact with your Spark Pages that you create on the phone on the computer, because if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud account, your Spark Pages and Spark Projects are going to be synchronized your Creative Cloud and you can see here, on My Projects here, I have a couple of these Ostrichland projects and I've got a couple of Adobe Spark posts, promotional graphics that I was making.

But if I come over here to preview this project, you can see that here I can work with the project the same way I could on my phone. So, I can edit it here, add all the components. I actually do that quite a lot sometimes. I'll start the project on the phone, but then finish it on the computer. Then if you, again, have an Adobe Creative Cloud account, you can come in here and there's an option to remove the Adobe Spark Branding, because if you don't have that turned on, at the end of the slideshow, there is going to be a little bit of the Adobe Spark Page logo showing up at the bottom.

Photography is all about telling stories and the ability to combine your photographs with text elements and be able to more effectively tell your story or present your article or your documentary piece is really a cool thing to be able to do on your phone, and Adobe Spark Page does it very, very well.