A spectacular sunrise in Sydney.
The Narrabeen Rockpools are a favourite spot I like to get back to from time-to-time, and although it is a bit of a hike and an early start, it has always paid off.
View Rockpool Sunrise on 500px | View Rockpool Sunrise on Flickr
Affinity Photo for iOS
This image was shot yesterday (as I write this) and was downloaded from my camera to my iPad. It was processed in Affinity Photo on my iPad Pro, and uploaded to this blog, and to 500px and Flickr using the built in share extensions.
Affinity Photo is an awesomely powerful photo editor, and marks, IMHO, the first real professional grade photo editing app for iPad. I think that I am really going to love this app. Affinity Photo has all the controls and capabilities that I would expect from a powerful imaging app, including HDR merge, panos and even focus stack merging.
I also really enjoy editing on an iPad Pro. The interaction of editing on a touch screen, and using the Pencil makes for a very enjoyable experience.
The downside to the process, at the moment, is that the DAM[1] functionality is provided only by Apple’s Photos app. While a decent app in some areas, it doesn’t allow true organisation and meta-data management. The limitations of Photos is the true limiting factor for serious amateur and professional photographers.
I hope that Affinity Photo or other another app will soon step up to provide DAM functionality.
Other apps are also emerging that position iPad for excellent photo editing. I plan to blog about Plotagraph+ shortly.
- DAM=digital asset management. ↩
Des
2 Aug 2017My passion is still photography – capturing wonderful landscapes, seascape, underwater and travel scenes is what inspires my photography. I have put together some short videos (mostly timelapse), but the truth of it is that still images grab me, and the challenge of creating an image that tells a story in the sort time a shutter is open is motivating.
Movement, however, catches the eye, and although a good still image can imply movement there are a number of emerging methods of bringing life to still images.
Since the middle of last year I have been Playing around with Plotagraph Pro as a way of bringing some animation to still images. I like the results, and Plotagraph Pro in that time has come out of beta, introduced new pricing tiers (including a free one) and started to rollout social sharing features.
The Plotagraphs website features some very impressive examples of Plotagraphs (Plotagraphy??) by some very talented image makers.
Recently the Plotagraph team, with the support of image makers like Trey Ratcliff, has released an iOS app called Plotagraph + which brings the functionality to mobile devices[1]. Alongside Affinity Photo for iPad this app is truly positioning the iPad Pro at the core of my on-the-go photo workflow.
I created this Plotagraph in a few short minutes on the iPad on Sunday afternoon.
[vimeo 227603429 w=640 h=481]
Red Sky Blue Pools from Des Paroz on Vimeo.
The image below shows the edits I made to the original image
Plotagraph+ edits in progress on iPadEssentially the green-dots-leading-to-red-dashed-lines-to-blue-arrowheads are what I set for the direction and speed of movement, and the red dots near the horizon are anchor points that prevent movement beyond them.
Plotagraph+ Pros
Easy (very easy) to use.
Easy output to video and animated PNG formats.
Price effective.
Plotagraph+ Cons
No output to animated GIF for simple sharing[2].
App crashes if you try to load a RAW file[3].
Only sharing option is through Photos. I’d love to be able to share to Dropbox or other galleries (such as Plotagraphs.com) more directly.
Final Thoughts
I love this app, and the promise it provides for a fun and easy way to give life to images. Like HDR[4] Plotagraphs will likely allow image makers to express their worldview in their own art, and of course beauty will be in the eye of the beholder. A lot of Plotagraphs will be good, some will be great and some will have faces that only the owner could love.
For me, a relatively small portion of my images will be Plotagraphs, but I will have fun creating and sharing some when it suits the image and the story I am trying to tell with it.
For more info on Plotagraph+ take a look at this video by Trey Ratcliff
This post also appears on: desparoz.com
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