iPad Photography App: Filterstorm 2: Adorama Photography TV

[music playing]
Male announcer: You are watching Adorama TV.
Mark Wallace: Hi everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Adorama TV iPad Application
Review. Well, this week we're looking at an application called Filterstorm 2. We've looked
at a lot of applications that allow you to add effects and edit photos on the iPad. This
one is one that I think stands above and beyond the rest. It allows you to do all kinds of
things, including upload your images to an FTP site. There's so much to this application
that we really want to dive in. So let's take a look at Filterstorm 2.
Filterstorm is an application that has all kinds of things that will allow you to edit
pictures. So, it's broken up into a left hand side that has all of your controls. And the
right hand side where the photo will be when you edit that.
Now, to start out with, there are some video tutorials you can watch that go into really
great detail on how Filterstorm two works. We're going to just show you some of the features
of Filterstorm. Because it has so many, we can't make it through all of them in this
video.
So the first thing I'm going to is I'm going to hit Load Photo. Then I'm going to go in
here to one of my photos here. I'm going to get this photo that I took. This is of one
of our models, Jessica. I chose this photo on purpose because the color temperature is
wrong. It needs some color correction as well as I have a ColorChecker Passport here by
X-Rite. So I can show you how you can do some things that I've never seen in an iPad application
before.
So before I do that, let me go through how these adjustments are organized. On the left,
you have the Canvas tab. In the Canvas tab, you can crop, scale, rotate, straighten, and
flip an image. So let me go through those really quickly.
So to crop an image, you hit Crop. It's going to give you an option to do either the original
ratio or you can set a ratio that's specific to your needs. Once you have that set, you
can say Crop and then it gives you these tools so that you can go in, changing the size.
Then moving the crop. Then when you get it to exactly where you want it to be, you touch
Crop and the image is cropped.
Now the nice thing about this is that at any point you can go back in time and you can
undo things. So I can hit this little watch right here and it shows me all of my last
steps. So, I'm going to go back here and hit this. That's the last place I was. And BAM,
there's my picture, all back to where I was just the step before.
Now Scale. What I can do is I can put in a specific width or height. That's really nice
if you're putting a photo on a blog and you need it to be a specific width or height.
Or you're going to email it or something like that. So you can actually resize by pixel,
which is really, really nice.
The rotate feature does just a simple rotation, either to the right or to the left. If you
want to straighten your photo, then you hit this Straighten tab. What that will allow
you to do is rotate that in just small increments. So it's straight, just like you want it.
Then Flip allows you to flip things left to right, right to left, or upside down, et cetera.
Those are very, very straight forward.
Now the other thing that you can do here is you can go into the filters. The filters are
where all the power lies in this application. So you can go in here and you can change your
luminance. Look at that. You actually have curves so you can change this curve by dragging
it down, dragging it up. You can add points to this curve. So if you want more than one
point, you can do that.
Then you can really change your contrast by doing this. So this is really good. So simple
controls right here: brightness and contrast. More powerful controls there if you are familiar
with curves.
The other thing you can do is you can apply this with a mask. Then just paint in those
areas that you want to change with those curves. So it doesn't apply it to the entire photo.
That is true with almost all of the filters. You can apply a mask and then just paint that
in.
So I'm not going to apply that. I'm just going to go here to the hue and saturation. Now
here's something that's really cool. Notice I have this temperature slider. Now I want
to really make sure I set this color temperature over here accurately. So I can actually drag
this over and I see on my ColorChecker Passport that's where middle gray should be. Then it
adjusts the color there. I can adjust it either cooler or warmer.
Now I have fixed my color. Just to prove to you that this is actually working, I'm going
to drag this up here to a color that's really not right. So this blue. You can see it does
the opposite. You can see this really nasty tone here. So I'll go back here to a gray.
This is something I've not seen in an application for the iPad. Where you can actually change
the color temperature of your photo. That's really, really nice.
You can also go in somewhere and apply that so that it's nice and my color is correct.
I can change this to a black and white image. I sort of like that, but look at this. I can
actually view filtering based on red, green, and blue. So, sorry about that. I can go in
here and take this slider and slide it more. So I have my reds a little bit, the luminance
up or down on the reds. Same with the greens or blues.
So if you're familiar with more advanced black and white conversions, you have this in this
application. So again, this is something that I've not seen on an application for the iPad
before. It's really, really nice.
Now I'm going to say there's one more thing I can do to this. I can say Apply and paint
color on black and white. So I can now go in here and paint in some color on her lips.
I can paint this in. So this is one of those things that many people like to do with photos.
They can go in there and actually change that. You can change the opacity.
There's just a lot of stuff that you can do. There's a bunch of tools here that we don't
have time to go through. But there's some really, really strong features of really fine-tuning
how your filters are applied. I'm not going to hit the check mark here, which is the OK.
I'm going to hit X because I don't want to do that. I just want to keep it black and
white there.
Then there's a bunch of other things I can do here: adding vignettes, colorizing it,
posterizing the image. You can do all types of things there. We don't have time to go
through all of those. But they're very powerful tools.
Now what I can also do is I can add metadata to this image. So I can go in here. I can
put my headline, my ITPC title, my caption, keywords, instructions, et cetera. Now this
is really powerful if you're uploading photos to an FTP site. That's right. You can actually
click this button and then you can save this to your photos. You can save it to your photos
and then email it. Or you can save it to your photos and post it to an FTP site. This supports
up to three different FTP sites.
So you can export it as a small, which is an 1,800 pixel preview image. 1,800 pixels
on the long site. Or up to 3,072 pixels which is a much higher resolution image. So this
is something that really sets it apart from other applications.
Now I'll show you one other thing. I can hide this bar if I want to go in here and look
at my image and see how that's doing. But to set all those FTP filters in Settings.
So what I can do is I'll exit the application. I'll go back here and I'll go into my Settings
on my iPad. Then if I go down here to my Apps, I can go to Filterstorm and you see here.
There's FTP server one, FTP server two, FTP server three. You've got all kinds of different
things that you can save here as your preferences and presets, metadata settings. All of that
stuff is built-in.
So when you're using your Filterstorm, it has all of that. So it saves you a lot of
time. So that's Filterstorm 2, a really powerful image editing application.
Well, that's Filterstorm 2. As you can tell, that app is really loaded: lots of features.
In fact, there's so much that we didn't get to all of it in our review. Well, if you'd
like to see more iPad applications, just go to the Adorama Learning Center. There's a
bunch of our reviews there. And if you have questions about photography or apps for the
iPad, you can send those questions to me at askmark@adorama.com. Well, thanks for joining
me. I'll see you next week.
[music playing]
Female announcer: This episode is brought to you by Adorama TV. Visit the Adorama Learning
Center where you'll find photography tips and techniques, links to the gear used in
this episode, and related videos. For all the latest photography, video, and computer
gear, visit Adorama.com. The next time you're in New York City, visit our store located
on 18th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue.