| Cult of Mac

Vertical panoramas are the iPhone camera’s hidden jewel

By

It's not a vertical panorama, but at least if fits at the top of this post.
It's not a vertical panorama, but at least if fits at the top of this post.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Panoramas are those super-wide, letterboxed strips of photos that look spectacular, and that are impossible to fit into Instagram. Maybe you already shoot a lot of panoramas, and maybe you even use the pano camera to create amazing glitch photos.

But did you consider that panoramas don’t have to be super-wide? They don’t even have to be horizontal. Let’s take a look at vertical panoramas — the iPhone photographer’s surprisingly great secret weapon.

Halide brings Deep Fusion-style photo processing to older iPhones

By

Smartest Processing,
Shot with Halide.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Today’s release of iOS 13.2 brings Apple’s new Deep Fusion feature, so iPhone 11 owners can start taking beautifully detailed photographs of sweaters. But if you have an older iPhone, Halide has you covered. The iOS photo app’s new Smartest Processing update brings Deep Fusion-style detail to anybody’s sweater shots.

How to remove the background from your Portrait photos

By

Geese with transparent background
Honk honk! Goodbye pesky background.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The iPhone’s incredible Portrait mode does a great job of blurring the backgrounds of photos, making the subject stand out from busy backdrops. (Apple also uses this depth information for its truly awful Portrait Lighting effects — has anyone ever gotten a good result from the Stage Light filter? — but that’s another story.)

What if you could use the depth information inside Portrait photos to get rid of the background entirely? Wouldn’t that be something? Well, yes it would. And if you have the right app, it’s really easy to remove photo backgrounds.

Pixelmator Photo first impressions: An amazing iPad image editor [Review]

By

Pixelmator Photo should be on every photographer’s iPad.
Pixelmator Photo should be on every photographer’s iPad.
Photo: Nuria Gregori

Pixelmator Photo, a new image-editing app for iPad, gives you tons of tools for tweaking your images. The app lets you apply filters, crop, trim and generally making your photos look great.

In this regard, Pixelmator Photo is like a zillion other photo apps for iOS. What sets it apart are a) the now-expected Pixelmator polish, and b) machine learning that powers pretty much everything.

I’ve taken the app, which launches today, for a quick spin, and it’s pretty great. The photo-editing space is so crowded with great apps, though, that we’re spoiled for choice. How does Pixelmator Photo match up?

Portrait mode remains miraculous — but frustrating — on iPhone XS [Opinion]

By

Portrait Mode is great, until it’s not. Fix failed focus with Focos.
When it works, Depth Control lets you dial in just the right amount of blur.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Portrait mode on the iPhone XS is pretty amazing — when it works. I gave it a good, hard workout after the device’s launch in September 2018, and found it to be an almost miraculous trick to fake the optical depth of photos taken on a bigger camera.

But after using it for half a year, does Portrait mode still seem so great? No. While it’s still just as impressive, sometimes it’s so frustrating to use that I just give up, quit the Camera app, and don’t bother to take a photo at all.

Hyperspektiv 2.0 is the bestest, glitchiest photo filter app ever

By

Every single filter on Hyperspektiv is killer.
Every single filter on Hyperspektiv is killer.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Hyperspektiv is one of my favorite photo apps from the past few years. Instead of screwing with your digital photos to make them look like olde timey film photos, it screws with your digital photos to make them look crazy and awesome. It’s a glitch-style filter app, and it pretty much decimates your images, turning them into incredible video clips, and — now — still photos.

Hyperspektiv 2.0 is out, and it cranks up the heat on the image-mangling burner to H-O-T.

Nizo blurs the lines between shooting and editing video

By

Nizo manages to mix power and ease of use. Take note, Apple.
Nizo manages to mix power and ease of use. Take note, Apple.
Photo: Nizo

Nizo is a new take on video apps. It manages to blend shooting and editing together, so you can edit your movies on the fly as you capture them.

The interface to do this is — like much good design — so clean and obvious that you wonder why it wasn’t done before. Let’s take a look.

Hyperspektiv app glitches up your photos and videos [Review]

By

Imagine this moving, and you might start to get seasick.
Imagine this moving, and you might start to get seasick.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Hyperspektiv is a contradiction. Photo-editing apps are designed to make your photos look better by making them look nicer. Hyperspektiv is designed to make your photos look better by making them look worse.

Not only that, it’s one of a handful of photo apps that don’t try to mimic the limitations of film photography, like grain and light leaks. Instead, it ditches the nostalgia and uses truly digital means to glitch up your images, turning them into stills and videos that would look fantastic in a music video.

Use this quick tweak to fix the iPhone XS’ flat photos

By

Punchy pomegranate, no auto-enhance required.
Punchy pomegranate, no auto-enhance required.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The iPhone XS’ camera is amazing, but put an unedited shot next to an unedited photo from the older iPhone X, or one of Google’s Pixel phones, and it looks a little flat. To “fix” this, you can tap the auto-enhancing Magic Wand tool on the edit screen, but this takes things too far in the opposite direction, making faces as orange as Florida bodybuilders.

I actually prefer the less-gaudy images from the XS, but sometimes they need a little extra pop. And the good news is, you don’t have to spend lots of time editing. There’s one slider built into the Photos app that will fix things up right away.