Sunday, August 28, 2011

Hipstamatic: Film & Lens Combinations; Isolated Frames & Overlays (with Dark & Light “Scene” Examples)

If you're anything like I am, you want to know what Hipsta's doing to your photographs. So, I decided to see, firsthand, what the Overlays and Frames are in relative isolation.

I read a lot of Hipstamatic reviews on the iTunes store, and a good number of people seem to utterly confused as to what Hipstamatic does and how it does it. Experimentation is the only solid, real cure for that...but maybe this set of examples will help.  And yeah, this took forever to do--and I'm simply giving it away. ;)

You'll see these test images are, again, fully iterated (all Film & Lens combinations)...plus I did each of those as Dark and Light. The darks are with a finger over the iPhone's lens, and the lights were shots of white paper under a lamp. (Since the light versions weren't self-contained, you'll have to mentally remove the paper grain and somewhat uneven light...but, hey--you'll live.)

NOTES:

•  Notice how Hipsta programmatically rotates and flips many of the borders and overlays.

• You can see why BlacKeys Ultrachrome b+w photographs have such beautiful, subtle tints--based on lens selection.

• I still hate Pistil, and never use it. Lame border and useless, white-line "light leak".

• My final jpeg-crunching introduced some lossy noise, but it should still be apparent that a (comparitively small) number of the overlays contain some nasty posterization, which is apparent in final photographs--especially if you take them onto a big monitor to Photoshop them. Synthetic Corp really needs to clean up the offending overlays; that kind of mojo-adding is ugly, "Atari 2600" and not "vintage" or "good looking at all".  Some of it gets obscured by the particular lights/darks it's asked to modify, but I've spent a fair amount of time editing it out of my photographs. Since there are some really nice, smooth fades in most of the overlays (vignettes, leaks, etc) it's not a compression, file size or anti-aliasing issue, on the develpoment end.

• Isolated frames are helpful as masks in Photoshop: this whole project grew out of my need to remove the "peel gunk" from the frames of photographs taken with BlacKeys Ultrachrome b+w. While I love that film (love, love, love), its border is way too "Hipstamatic-y" and static. Having that in isolation really helps in masking and rebuilding edges.















2 comments:

  1. Thanks for all the hard work. It really helps to understand what my lens and film combination selection does for my images. I like finding out how Hipstamatic rotates filters, and know that they are working on facial recognition. (to highlight faces, black out eyes, lotsa cool stuff) Anywhoo, thanks.

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  2. Hi Nick,

    Thank you for visiting The iPhone Arts the other day and I am sorry it took so long to get back but I kept looking for your email address which is no where available. I would like very much for us to communicate so could you please drop me a line, along with a phone number to reach you, i would greatly appreciate it this.

    Warmst regards,
    Egmont

    TheiPhoneArts@gmail.com

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