Grabbing an image of this type can be difficult with a real camera, as it requires rather precise steps, but smartphones are equipped with apps making the process easy for anyone to pull off.
There’s an App for That
Awesome Miniature is a free app available from Google Play and it features three blur effects, live blur and 30 different filters to choose from. There are two versions of Awesome Miniature – free and paid. Likely free, which I am using here is more than enough for most users. The paid option retails for $3.99 and packs in a few additional features.
Get To Know Awesome Miniature
The app opens to the camera, and you will note a number of options available, including, not only take a photo, but also load a photo, user manual and settings. Other icons appear across the bottom of the screen, but those come into play later.
Take a Picture
You probably didn’t get this app to edit old image, but instead to capture new memories and that’s what we going to do here. Tilt-shift works best from elevation, though for this example, I don’t have that luxury. When you first click “take a photo”, you will be prompted to choose the camera you wish to utilize, and a display of all available on your device is listed. Once you have captured your image, you have three options for procession – fast (360×640), normal (576×1024) and pro (720×1280). The latter requires the pro version of the app. We will go with normal here.
Edit Your Image
Now you have some hard choices to make – how to edit that picture to make it just right. There are easy option like crop and rotate, but much harder ones when it comes to other choices – blue, fx, exposure, color, white balance – its a mountain of decisions, but good to have the choices.
The blur and fx are likely the most important aspects here. Blur allows you to tap and drag to choose the focus area, meaning the outside of that line will blur, much like a DSLR in portrait mode. You then have the option to apply blur strength, using a sliding scale. As for fx, the options feel almost limitless. FX is a movie term for effect, as in “special effects” and it works much the same as filter in Instagram, but much cooler because it can do a lot more (even more if you pony up for the Pro version of the app).
Conclusion
Awesome Miniature hold tremendous potential for budding photographers. Not only can it utilize the camera apps on your device, including top ones like Camera 360 and Camera FX, but can also edit and filter. There is a lot you can do here and it is a fun learning experience and guide to perhaps being able to one day pull these shots off with a point and shoot.
