Depth map blurring with PortraitCam

- [Seán] Hey, everybody. Seán Duggan here and welcome back to another installment of Mobile Photography Weekly. On this episode, we're gonna check out a cool app for iOS called PortraitCam that will let you apply custom blurring effects that take advantage of the depth map that's created in portrait mode of dual camera iPhones. And if that's not cool enough, and that is pretty cool, it also has an automatic face detection feature so that you can use it with regular, non depth map portraits. There are also depth map editing tools, other blurring filters, lens flare effects, color look presets, and more.

Let's check it out. So when you start up the app, you can either open an image by tapping the photo thumbnail in the lower left or you can tap on the round button to use the camera part of the app, so let's go into that. In camera mode, you can tap to set the initial focus and exposure and there's an exposure compensation slider down on the bottom which you can use to fine tune the exposure. The inset view in the lower corner is showing you a live view of the depth map that is being generated by the two lenses in the phone.

You can switch between a gray scale version of that or if you tap that little color gradient up at the top, it'll switch to a color version. Now if you tap the little inset icon, which is up near the front facing camera view, it'll switch to a full screen view of that live depth map. I'll tap on that again and then I'll tap on the color icon again, and now we can see the gray scale view. Just tap on that again to turn that off. So as interesting as the live depth map feature is from a technical perspective, I don't find that it adds really to the photography experience, and in some cases, it might even be distracting.

So for that reason, I prefer to user the regular iPhone camera for shooting in portrait mode and then I'll edit those shots in portrait cam. And speaking of which, let's go into the editing part of the app and check out the cool ways that you can apply blurring effects. I'll just tap cancel here and I'll tap on the thumbnail to open up a picture. One nice thing about portrait cam is that if there are photos that have a depth map associated with them, it'll have a depth badge on the thumbnails here in the main photo library view.

I'm gonna go out to an album that I have set up just for this demo, and let's go grab a picture. If the photo you're opening already has a depth map, meaning that it was photographed with a dual camera iPhone in portrait mode or in an app like PortraitCam, the first editing screen will be one where you can adjust the blue. And so you just get a slider and you can adjust that blur. It's a little bit rough there as it's rendering, but then it renders very nicely. You can also adjust the shape of the aperture highlights.

That's kind of interesting. You can do a spin, which works well if you have a lot of highlights in the background. I'm gonna set that back to something a little bit more conservative. You can adjust the brightness of the highlights of the blur points in the background, you can add a color fringe. If you tap on depth, you can see a color overlay which shows you what areas in the image will be rendered out of focus and you can even adjust that. So you can see I can dial that back or have more of it come over the foreground subject here.

If you tap invert, it's gonna invert the focus. Tap that again. And if you tap depth map, you can actually see the depth map. This looks really interesting on some images where there's a lot of different variation between foreground to middleground to background. And then finally at the end here, there are a lot of other controls that you could adjust. Let's just set it back to blur here and let's go check out the mask. If the image has a depth map associated with it, it will automatically be using the depth map view. Notice that you can also edit the mask.

I'm not gonna edit this particular image. We're gonna take a look at that in a minute. You can also apply standard radial landscape or gradient blurs and each of these can be adjusted with a two finger gesture. So the landscape blur will apply a blur in the foreground and in the background or the top and the bottom as you can see here, and we also have just a regular gradient blur that you can apply. Set that back to depth map and let's go onto the flares. There's a variety of color flares you could add if you wanna stylize your portrait that way and you can modify those in a variety of ways.

And there's also filters, which are essentially color look presets. Some of these are actually quite nice and there's even some nice black and white ones here at the end. Let's open up a different image here and explore how we can use this app on a photograph that was not taken with a dual camera iPhone and was not taken with portrait mode. So once again, I'm gonna go out to my album and let's open up this shot here. Again, this is just a regular shot so it is running the detecting faces operation on it and as you can see, it's done a really good job finding her face there and its made a mask that encompasses most of her body.

There's a few little places there where it didn't quite get it, and so I'm gonna leave it set to the magic wand tool, which is active now, and I'll just drag over that area there and you can see how it automatically and intelligently fills that in. Now, because the fur collar has a very soft, indistinct edge, it's not gonna be able to do a great job with that. And let's kind of come over here, get this.

And then finally up here by the side of her face, I'm gonna have to go to the eraser tool and by the way, I can change the brush size here if I need to, and erase that part right there which is kind of extending out onto the side of the mountain in the background. Alright, that's good enough for now. Let's tap done and now I can use the blurring features to apply a blur to the background image.

I'm not gonna go too crazy. Sometimes that looks a little bit unnatural, but a little bit of a blur is nice. Maybe I'll put a little bit of a spin on that just to kind of make it a little bit more abstract looking. So that's really cool that I can have a picture that was not photographed with a depth map, but I can still apply these sorts of effects to it. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that this particular image is a fairly easy challenge for the face detection automatic masking feature because the young woman is very distinct against the background.

She is wearing a dark coat, the background is very light, so this is an easy job. If you have a situation where somebody's hair is really frizzy, that's gonna be definitely more of a challenge and the other thing that I would like to see in this app is the ability to soften the edge of the mask because sometimes, it's just a little bit too hard edged in some places and I really would love the ability to soften that. Somehow I think that this is probably a development that is going to be forthcoming in this app, and that is really one of the main things that I would love to see to improve it.

So despite its name, PortraitCam is not just for portrait images. Its blurring features work really well with lots of other subjects. Let's take a quick look. PortraitCam has a lot of very interesting functionality for taking advantage of the depth map created with dual camera iPhones and in addition to that, I really appreciate that I can use it with non depth map images. Although it certainly works great to create cool styling effects for portrait images, I find that it's just as fun to use with other subjects as well.

The blurring effects that I can apply and customize have allowed me to revisit many photos and come up with new and creatively satisfying interpretations that embrace the beauty of the blur.