Focal Lab

Let's talk a little more about blur, tilt shift and creating a different world or viewpoint in your imagery. FocalLab is a nice tool which contains a handful of blur effects. It's clean, simple and easy to use.Once in the app, if you tap on the "i" in the bottom right corner this loads the cheat sheet of features.Tap on "FocalLab" to load your blur options:Dreamy BlurSoft FocusZoom BlurMotion BlurVignetteBlack and WhiteResizeThe blur's, vary, of course, if you want a dreamy, glowy effect you may like either the Dreamy Blur or Soft Focus. If you want a more dizzying effect, check out the Motion or Zoom blur.Want to move the central point of focus, tap on the image, and move your finger around on the image, you should see the central focus point move about. Want to expand or contract that point, pinch your fingers together to make it smaller, or part your fingers to expand the circle. There's no real guide to show you the diameter, but you should visibility see a change.The Vignette tool offers a circular, elliptical or square/rectangular option. After playing around with the vignette tool, I'm not a huge fan of it. If you use the slider you can adjust the amount of the vignette but if you remove the vignette you can see see where the vignette would be, like a circle in the middle of the photo. I've never actually used this particular feature of this app. I believe there are other apps that handle a vignette more smoothly, like Snapseed.The settings option, provides you with a few file output sizes, as as a crop on/off button. I've saved an image with the crop on or off and haven't seen a difference, so that might be a bug with this app. Or, I'm just missing something!As I said before, it's nice app, I'll usually use this in conjunction with another app or three ;).If you're wondering about these little houses, they sit on Lake Union, near the Fremont neighbourhood of Seattle. If I had loads of $$'s it would be amazing to have one of these little cuties!