Mobile Photography Weekly

- [Instructor] Hey everybody, Sean here, and this week we're gonna revisit the Focos app for iOS that I covered in a recent episode to explore how you can use a depth map to either replace a background or export a file with a transparent background that you can use in other collage or compositing apps. So just to recap, the Focos app works with photos that have been shot using the portrait mode on iPhones with dual cameras, as well as images shot with the camera part of the Focos app itself.

This applies to photos made with iOS 11, since that's when Apple opened this feature up to be accessed by other developers. So I'm gonna tap down at the bottom there to bring up my list of photos that have the portrait effect, or the depth map effect, and go and grab one. So when you open an image, you can tap on different areas of the image to set that as the focus, so if I tap on the background, I can have the background in focus and the foreground out of focus, so that's pretty cool.

We just tap back on the woman and make her in focus, and I can move this slider here to adjust the level of blur in the background. There are also some other interesting features here where you can alter the shape of the lens iris, the brightness and color of the blurred highlights, as well as other creative options. Now some of those are only available in the Pro version of the app, which you can purchase via an in-app purchase, either as a monthly or yearly subscription, or you can have lifetime access to all the features with a one-time purchase.

But since I covered those features in the earlier episode, I'm gonna skip ahead to the effects section, which is accessed by tapping on the little star wand icon down there. Now on this screen here, I can drag on this little degree slider to see a 3D representation of the depth map in the image, and I can drag on these bokeh sliders down below to adjust the focus fall-off for both the back of the image behind the main subject, or the front of the image as well.

What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna tap on the plus button here, because this is where it gets really interesting. I can use the depth map almost as a mask to add different effects, and control where those effects show up in the image based on the depth map. So you can see here there's a wide range of options and effects that I could apply here, but what I find really intriguing, as somebody who likes to do collages and composites, are these three here down towards the bottom, background picture, black portrait, and transparent background.

I'm gonna tap on background picture, and let's go and get a new photo to bring in, and see how it works. So that actually looks pretty good. Down below, I have two sliders I can play around with. I have depth, and if I slide this back towards the left side, there you can see I can bring in the original background, and then have that fade away. And let's just see how far up I can get this.

At a certain point, she starts to become transparent on the sides there. Now that could be interesting if I was going for maybe a more supernatural effect, but for now I'm gonna leave this a little bit more normal in terms of those edges, but I do wanna have nice soft edges there. And then I'm going to adjust the fade-out slider and see what I can modify there. So that looks pretty good. I can see some changes there on the left side. Leave it set like that, and let me just adjust this side again.

Maybe a little bit more here. Alright, we'll call it good for now. I'll tap the check mark to apply that, and notice here if I move this degree slider that I now have a layer here above the back bokeh slider for that background. And if I tap on that layer, I can have access to those sliders again and fine-tune it if I need to. I'll tap the X to cancel that, and let me just tap back on the aperture button here, and we can see how that looks there.

So that's looking pretty good. I'm gonna tap save, and we'll save that out. Alright, I'm gonna go back to the star wand icon, and I'm gonna press and hold on that new background layer, and then drag it over to the trash can to get rid of it, and let's tap the plus again. Let's just quickly go and take a look at black portrait. This essentially is giving us the same kind of an effect that I could create using the studio lighting effects that are available with the iPhone 10 and the iPhone 8 Plus.

So if you wanted to have a black background on your image, here is one way you could do that. I'm gonna cancel that. Let's tap the plus symbol one more time, and let's go and take a quick look at transparent background. So this is essentially doing the same thing that we saw where I added the new background. It's just adding transparency behind the subject. And I can modify this here to customize my edges. Now I'm noticing over on the left side of her, I can see a little bit of some of the green grass that's showing through, kind of where her hair is, over by her blue sleeve there.

I am able to make minor edits to the depth map in this app. I did cover that in the previous episode, so if you're interested in checking that out, go and see that episode. For now what I'm gonna do is I'll just tap the check mark, and you can see the little banner up there that says that the image would be saved as a transparent PNG file if I were to save this. What I wanna do is go out to an album here and show you how I've used this effect on a different image of this same subject.

So here is the image that I took specifically to test out this transparent PNG background. I specifically focused on the young woman's hand to have the rest of her kind of fading out of focus. And then here's what the PNG with a transparent background looks like on a black background. This is what it looks like on a white background. Here is the image I chose for the new background. And here is the final composite image that I created in another app, in this case, Adobe Photoshop Mix. If you're a photographer or a digital artist who likes to combine images, the ability to use depth maps in the Focos app to replace backgrounds is really handy.

And being able to export a PNG file with a transparent background makes it much easier to blend photos in other collage or compositing apps. I'm really looking forward to experimenting with this feature more and seeing how I can use it.