TiltShift Gen is to my pictures what salt and pepper are to my food. TSG lets you add soft focus, vignetting, and adjust the colour, brightness, and contrast. The results are some seriously awesome, dramatic images that provide iPhoneography a lot more possibilities in any given situation. In fact, TiltShift Generator is so damn cool that I’ve taken to squinting at pretty much everything in the hopes of reproducing the same effect with my eyes. The squinting doesn’t work very well, but Tilt Shift Gen does.
[click on a thumbnail for a bigger preview]
The UI is very simple, but I think the app includes enough features to stay flexible and useful for the majority of my iPhone pics (unlike some of the other one-trick pony apps out there that only add one filter for $0.99). You control all of the effects with sliders along the bottom of the screen, and the effects all show up instantly so that you can really play around with your pictures.
Blur
The awesome thing about the blur effect is that it can be applied in in radial or linear fashion. I’ve played mainly with the radial filter to make an obvious focal point in a picture, and I really have to play with the linear filter more. The blur effect is the most flexible one I’ve seen in an iPhone app: you can adjust the area of effect by using multi-touch to adjust the radius of the circle (or the width and angle of the line), and the slider at the bottom of the screen adjusts the strength of the blur effect.
I’ve been extremely happy with the power to blur my images as I see fit, and I was probably a little too gung ho when I first bought the app. It’s so interesting to see things shift out of focus as you slide and adjust the filter, and once you get used to this ability it adds a whole new dimension to the iPhone’s photographic capabilities. I now find myself thinking two adjustments ahead as I take pictures on my 3GS: I play around with the exposure and focus of the actual lens as I take a picture like before, but I also think about what other effects I can play in post-processing via TiltShift Generator. As a result, I’m taking a lot more kinds of shots that I wouldn’t have bothered with before.
Saturation, Brightness, Contrast
These are hardly new effects to anyone who has used a photo editing application, but I’m glad they’re included in TSG. With these sliders you can easily adjust the intensity of the colours (or turn the picture black and white) and fiddle with the brightness. I usually tune the saturation up by 5-10 units, add contrast as needed, and leave brightness alone since it can make pictures look too washed out.
In the current version of the app these effects are applied to the whole of the picture, but I think it would be really interesting if there was an option to apply them locally – only to the areas that stay in focus, or only to the areas that are out of focus. I’m honestly not sure whether or not that would generate interesting pictures, but it sounds cool 😉
Vignette
Vignetting is a term I hadn’t encountered until I used TSG. The vignette slider lets you gradually lead the eye towards the center of the picture by darkening the edges. I apply this very sparingly or just leave it alone, but it can be a very interesting effect – especially if you don’t have too much going on in a picture.
Save or Export
Once you’ve edited a picture to your liking you can easily save the new version to your camera roll or export it an e-mail or tweet, nice and simple-like. The saved files can be re-sized or saved at the original picture resolution.
All Together Now!
I usually end up running my iPhone photos through a post-processing app to enhance the colours and contrast, and my other favourites, Photogene and Photoforge, were enough to make me happy before. However, TiltShift Generator has become my go-to app for anything I take with my camera – my digital salt and pepper shaker for my pictures. The set of sliding controls and the clever multi-touch implementation for the blur effect make it ridiculously fun and easy to touch the photos up, and I can’t imagine shooting without it now.
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TiltShift Generator is available on the App Store for $0.99.
TiltShift Generator was bought at author’s expense for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: Photography
