I needed someone to take a picture of me today and I was home alone with the kids. So what did I do? I set up my three year old with a tripod. He did a great job and got some really nice shots.

I turned the camera back on him and got a nice iPhone shot of him, but as typical with the iPhone, there was good outdoor light and the focus and ISO was good, but still the picture came out plain.

ColorSplash

What's great about the iPhone is that you don't have to stop there! Since he had his orange jacket on, I fired up ColorSpash and grayed out everything except the jacket. If you haven't played with ColorSpash, you NEED to. It is so fun and very easy. Basically the entire picture is turned gray and you color with your finger the parts you want the color to be returned. You can zoom in as much as you need to get exactly what you want, like you can see here to the right. In this shot, I've partially colored in his collar. And I end up with this:

Tilt Shift Generator

That's more fun, but it is still pretty flat. Next, to try some different exposures, blurring, and vignette effects I fire up TiltShiftGen. There are many apps that I could have used for this, but this is my favorite app recently particularly because of the blurring tool. You select the center and pinch-drag to set the radius. Then the slider sets how sharp or gradual the blur effect is.

Adjusting contrast and adding vignette brings out the subject and diminishes the distracting background objects.

The blurred doorway gives it the depth of field that it needs so badly but the iPhone cannot produce.

Final Result

And here's what I ended up with for the final result.

So much more interesting, I think. The picture comes to life.