Mobile Photography Weekly

- [Narrator] Hi, I'm Shaun Duggan, and this week, we're going to revist the Focos app for iOS. Focos offers many interesting possibilities for working with the depth maps that are generated by iPhones when you shoot in the portrait mode, or by other camera apps that can capture depth information. I've covered most of the Focos app functionality in a couple of previous episodes, so this time, I just want to focus, no pun intended, on a feature that wasn't in the app the last time we checked it out, the 3D lighting effects. I already have an image open in the Focos app, so let's tap on that and bring it up. This was photographed with the camera part of the Focos app, and that always photographs in depth capture mode. I'm just going to jump right into the 3D lighting effects by tapping on the little lightbulb down there at the bottom, and we have three different ways we can view and edit the image here. We have the 3D view, which is what we see here. We also have a 2D view, which is just essentially a regular view of the photograph, and there's an AR view, for augmented reality. I'm not going to go into the AR view, because it really doesn't pertain to what we're doing here with these edits. Just go back to the 3D view. And, I'm going to use a two-finger gesture here to manipulate this and drag it around. You can see we have an obvious foreground subject with that wheel, and then, the background area. The first thing I'm going to do is add a new light by scrolling over and tapping on the plus button for new light. I have six different types of lights to choose from. I'm just going to choose a lightbulb. And, if I drag with a single finger, you can see that there's that lightbulb, and watch what happens as I get it close to the wheel. You can see the shadows appearing, and the shadows are based on the structure of that actual wheel in the photograph, so that is courtesy of the information that was captured in the depth map. In terms of what I can do with this light, I can adjust the lightness here, make it brighter or dimmer. I'm actually going to make it fairly bright. And then, I'm going to adjust the color, and give this a reddish-orange color, and kind of move that close there, maybe bring the lightness up a little bit more. I can adust the range, which controls how much of the image is affected. So, if I raise it up, you can see that more of the background is being affected by that light. I want to have mainly just the wheel and the area in close proximity to that light affected, so I'll just bring it back to about midway point. And then, the diffuse slider just governs whether this is a softer light source or a harder light source. I'm going to make it fairly hard here. We'll get to the shadows in a minute. So, right now, what I'm going to do is use a two-finger gesture to manipulate the 3D view, so I'm kind of looking at a top-down vIew. And then, I'm going to use a single finger to move this orange light. Now, watch what happens when I get close to this wheel here. I can drag this light closer and actually have it go behind the wheel, and behind that structure there. That is so cool. And again, this is all from that depth map, which is sensing the depth differential between the front of the wheel and the back of the wheel there. And as I do that, you can really see those shadows be a lot more pronounced there. Now, one aspect of this sort of editing, where you're placing virtual lights and adjusting them, and finetuning them, and getting it looking just right, is that it can be fairly time-consuming. So, what I'm going to do is skip ahead and save some time here. I'm going to tap the three dot button up in the upper right part of the app, and I'm going to choose to paste edits, and I'm going to paste down the edits that I created in an earlier session with this same image. And, let's just see what's going on here. So, I have two of these orange lights, and you can see, there's one there. That's the one that kind of goes behind the wheel. And then, I have another one in the front here. If I tap on that, I can make that active, and that's kind of casting the bright light up there. I was kind of going for a industrial look, like this was maybe in a factory, or near a steel mill, or near a blast furnace, something like that. So, that was my creative interpretation there. Now, I'm going to use a two finger gesture to zoom out a bit on the 3D view, and you can see, I have two other lights, these green rings, and those are ring lights. So, if I tap on one to activate it, you can see, I have a little pointer there, and I can drag on that to change the direction of that light, and that is just so, so cool. So, this light here is not only creating a purple color on the background, it's also darkening it down. And the front light is affecting mainly the top part of that stamp mill structure there. So, that's a quick overview of the 3D lighting controls in Focos. They're certainly not the same thing as real lights, of course, or working with an actual 3D program, but the fact that I can do this on my phone with an image that just has a simple depth map is pretty cool. As is often the case with new tools and technical capabilities, I'm still experimenting with this and figuring out different ways that I might use it for creative post-processing. But so far, I like what I see, and I'm interested in further explorations.