Today's episode is all about depth of field. Particularly shallow depth of
field, where your main subject in focus
and your background is sharp. I'm gonna show you the Apple camera
how to do this using the lock focus mode and also gonna show you how to cheat it
using an app.
This is particularly great we've got photo where you need to separate the main subject
from your background.
Adorama TV presentes iPhoneography with Nicki Fitz-Gerald.
One of the most popular techniques used by
professional photographers is creating a depth of field.
Now this is simply where we have the main subject in focus and the background
usually blurred.
Now adding depth of field is really going to
add a professional look to your photograph and guess what. It's really
easy to do an iPhone
and I'm gonna show you how.
To have more control over the look of your photos
one of the things you really need to get to grips with is the lock focus mode in
your Apple camera.
Now this isn't complicated at all but it's a really important thing to
learn and I guarantee once you've learned it you're going to be using it
ninety-nine percent of the time.
Now the autofocus mode in the Apple camera is pretty good you can check how
quick is
in our focus pixels episode. but if you want the camera
to see something the way you're seeing it, then you need to lock for focus on
the part the image you want to get sharp. The Apple camera won't always do that for
you.
So to learn this aspect of it is really important. I’ll show you how to do this in
this scene we've got behind me here
on these little daffodils. If I point my camera, now I'll open the Apple camera first
and point my camera to the scene behind me. Well you can see when we’ve got
our camera here, the auto-focus is automatically focusing on the scene in the
background.
What we want is the daffodils in focus. So what we need to do is click on
there. There the daffodils sprung into life. The backgrounds gone nice and blurred.
We've got that great depth of field. Look. I'll take a photograph.
What happens is the focus just went back into the
background and now we've got the daffodils once again out to focus.
Now we want to lock focus on.
We simply, instead of tapping we tap and hold.
The auto-exposure/atup-focus lock comes on
and now we've got our beautiful daffodils once again in focus.
We could take that picture and look what happens when I've taken it. The autofocus
doesn't reset. We’ve got our daffodils here still in focus.
If we wanted to move them around they'd still be there in focus no problem,
and we can carry on continue taking photographs. A simple technique, a really easy one but
it really can make a huge difference to your photography.
Sometimes with an iPhone
we don't always get our photos exactly how we want them because we're rushing to
take that shot, we’re in a hurry.
We can lose our subject against a busy background. So we can actually
cheat this depth of field effect by bringing our subject forward and making our
background blurred
after we've taken the photograph. I'm gonna show you how to do this in
the app called Leonardo. So the first thing we need to do is open the Leonardo app.
We need to bring in our photograph by pressing the plus button on the top right hand
corner.
Click on photo library. Now we need to find our photograph.
Find the photo, click on it to bring it
into the Leonardo app and its formed a layer on the top right hand corner here.
We need to duplicate that layer,
because we’re going to blur that layer and then we're gonna mix the two together.
Click on that layer to duplicate it. See it’s come up duplicate here.
Click on that and what we're gonna do is gonna blur that layer
by clicking on the sun button at the bottom.
We’re going to find cause Gaussian Blur, click on that.
Then we’re going to
blur this whole layer just by sliding our slider across. I’m going to overdo it
little bit just to show you the technique. I’m going to click on the
tick button there. That’s blurred that layer.
What we need to do now is go back to our layers
I'm gonna bring this layer to the bottom by clicking and dragging. That's our blurred
layer.
So our sharp layer is now on top. We need to click on the sharp layer now that's
highlighted in blue.
What we're gonna do, we’re going to remove this sharp
layer, part of it to reveal the blurred background.
We do this by clicking on the masking tool. Click on the brush.
What you needs to do now is start rubbing he background away. What this
going to it is reveal that bottom
blurred layer. What happens here is
because this is blurred in the background, this is gonna make the
foreground
our main subject, Lewis nice and sharp. It gonna push it back. Now you can
adjust
the size of this brush slightly and the softness
just by using that tool there. You can go in really really nice and close.
Right close up here to his ear.
Work around. Nice and detailed so your going to get
fine soft-touch natural touch
around. We can make that brush bigger. I Should make it softer.
Let’s come in here and this get rid of that boat here.
Then brush all around with the wide brush.
Just fill in the bigger areas get rid of that litter bin which I didn't se when
I was taking the photograph.
If we go over the edges we can also
take that away again by pressing that icon
up there. Okay so you can see the effects now. It’s pushed that background right back. I've
over done it a little bit just to show the effect,
but you can see that's really making our main subject jump forward.
We can go in and refine that detail. Make our brush smaller.
Go right in, up close. Pixels let’s bring it back.
Work our way around.
Around his face. Bring that back a bit.
Bring his ear back. Just keep working around.
You start to see
the sharpness of Lewis really jumping forward
you see the effect is really made him pop forward.
Looks a bit strange at the moment because we've still left a few bits.
But there we go and I'm happy with that. We created that great depth of
field look.
That's fantastic, I’m really please with that . So there we have it. Two great ways of
creating
depth of field look. Using a lock focused using your Apple camera
or cheating it with a Leonardo app with a photograph you’ve already taken blurring the
background.
Keeping the main subject sharp. Have a go
it's really easy to do. Don't forget to subscribe to Adorama TV where you can
find
more information on iPhoneography related item and all our products. We'd love to know
what you
think, So like, comment and share our videos. Hop over to Adorama
TV Learning Center where you'll find lots more hints, tips, tricks and tutorials.
I’ll see you next time.
Do you want great-looking prints at low-cost? Be sure to visit our
easy to use online printing service. Adorama
pics has professionals who treat your images with the utmost care that you can
count on.
For a quick turnaround on photos, cards or albums
use adoramapix.com