Blurring effects with AfterFocus

- [Instructor] Hey, everybody, Sean Duggan here, and welcome back to another episode of Mobile Photography Weekly. This week, we're going to explore an app for Android and iOS called AfterFocus, that lets you create a depth of field blurring effect that you can add to your photos. So I'm going to come in and open up this image of the fence, and when you bring an image in for the first time you are asked what selection method you want to use to define the focus area.

So you can use Smart or Manual. Obviously different situations may call for different methods. I'm going to be using the smart selection method here, just because I want to show you how useful it is, and in a lot of cases it works really well. So in the toolbar on the left side, the top tool that is activated there and highlighted in blue, that is the Define Foreground tool, and then next we would have the Define Middle Ground tool and then finally the Define Background tool.

And if you wanted to hide that tool panel, you could do that. And by the way, let me point out that in the iOS version of this app, you have all the same controls, but the interface is slightly different. It's laid out a little bit differently, but everything is still there. All right, so I'm going to hide that tool panel there and I'm going to come in and define the foreground area, which is mostly the left third or left half of the image.

I'm just going to draw a line down here and define that as the foreground. Next I'm going to open up that tool panel, I'm going to get the Define Middle Ground tool, and we'll come in and define the middle ground. Something like that. And next I'm going to define the background. Now, one thing you can't do here is cross lines. So if I accidentally cross the line, it's going to tell me that I cannot in any circumstance do that.

So I will try this again, come in a little bit closer here. And do my best not to touch that gray line. And once I get down here, I can kind of go fairly fast. This little zoom loop is a really nice feature. The iOS version does not have that. So if you look at what's going on here, you can see that the red overlay that defines the foreground area is a little bit darker than the area that defines the middle ground, and then of course there's no overlay over the background.

I'm going to tap Next, and it applies the effect and, you know, right off the bat it seems to have done a pretty decent job. I can tap on Blur here and come in and modify the blur, maybe I don't want that background to be quite so out of focus there. Now, one thing I am noticing is that it doesn't look perfect there around the center post. There's kind of an area between the center post and the shadow of the tree that is in the same focus as the foreground, so what I'm going to do is tap the Back button and I'm going to zoom up close here and see if I can fix that.

So what I'm going to do is tap the Undo button there to undo the background, and then I'm going to undo the middle ground. So let me do this again. I'm going to put the middle ground more on the post here and see if that helps it out. We're just going to come down quickly and do this. And now I'll define the background as coming in close to that.

And we'll see if we get a better result. Sometimes, you know, at first glance, it seems like everything's okay, but then when you look closer, that's when you notice the issues. All right, let's tap Next. There we go, now I'm getting a much better blurring there on the far side of that post, a little bit more believable. So I'm going to turn that blur down a bit. These sliders are really close together on the Android app here, it makes it kind of difficult to grab those.

All right, so that's how you adjust the blur. And notice up above here, right now we're set to lens blur. I could use motion blur, I could choose zoom blur. So I've got three different types of blur I could apply. Under Aperture, I can choose the shape of the aperture and turn on a bokeh effect. We'll look at that on the next image, and we'll also look at fading background on the next image. We also have a basic brightness and contrast adjustment and some filters, and then some effects there at the end.

But it's done a pretty good job with this image here in terms of the receding focus. Now tap the Back button, and let's go get a different image. And I'm going to get this image here. And I'm going to define the foreground focus as the post. That white line is kind of hard to see on the white stripes of the post, but just carefully go in there and define this.

And the thing to remember about tools such as this is that it is all about expectation management. Because you have to manage your expectations in terms of what is possible in the app. What can the app do? And there are definitely going to be certain subjects that you give it where it's going to have trouble, and those are going to be ones that have rough, irregular edges or areas where the subject has parts within it that you can see the background through, such as a wrought iron fence or a tree or something like that.

Fortunately I'm working on a subject here that is fairly distinct. I'll get the background tool, and we'll come in and define the background. All right, that looks good on that side. Now, this is something I wish the developers would change in this app. I want to scooch this to the side to kind of have it positioned like that, but it wants to snap back. So let me hide my toolbar, and let's quickly come in and adjust this.

All right, let's tap the Next button, and it's done a pretty good job there. So let's explore a couple of other options here. Let's go into Aperture, and these aperture shapes refer to the actual shape that is created by a bladed aperture inside of a lens, and that's what controls how much light comes through the lens in a more traditional camera, and in certain images with shallow depth of field the highlights in the blurry areas will take on the shape of the aperture.

So you're really only going to see that when you turn on the bokeh effect, so if I dial up bokeh, you're going to see the highlights in the image get brighter. So those little points of light in the back. Now I can tap on the aperture shape and those little bright points of light change shape. I can make them heart-shaped if I want, if I was having a romantic weekend there, or star-shaped. I'm going to leave them more like a traditional aperture shape, I think, and I'll just apply that.

Next we have the fading background. This is actually one of the most interesting features of the AfterFocus app, because in a scene such as this, the water at the bottom of the picture would be more in focus than the water and the bridge in the far distance, because it of course is close to me. So that's what the fading background tool is for. If I tap on Natural, it is just going to take a stab at it, and that's a pretty good job, it's pretty convincing. So I would probably stay with that.

Or you can choose Manual, and with Manual, you just adjust these lines. So I might say, well, I want to have that be in focus there, but then I want to have the focus fall off. So let's try that. Something like that looks good. And so there you see some of those highlights in the middle ground have a little bit more focus effect applied to them. One final thing I'm going to mention here is that if I come into the More button in the upper right, that's those three dots, I can choose to save this project, and so the project would be saved so that I could work on it again.

I could re-open the project and everything would be flexible, I could come back and change it. And then I'm also going to tap that same button again and go into the Settings and point out that you can define what the maximum save image size is. Right now I have mine set to the original size of the image, what this picture was originally captured at. And on the current version of this app on iOS, the largest size that I've been able to find to save the image is about 3072 pixels, so smaller in size than what's available here on the Android platform.

With apps like AfterFocus that apply after the fact blurring to create a shallow depth of field effect, you have to realize that there are always going to be subjects that will be hard to work with and that may present problems for the app, especially if they have elements like wispy hair or tree branches or similar scenes. But the Smart Selection feature in AfterFocus does a pretty good job on a lot of images, as long as there is a clear difference between the subject and the background.