Shining Through panograph opened in Photoshop to view transparency
You Gotta See This! is an easy, fun app that creates panography, a panoramic collage style of photography. Panography is different than panorama in that images are very visibly tiled to create a collage. Click here to read my original review of the app.
The recently released 1.4 update has a cool new theme, Shining Through, which lets you save images with a transparent background. You gotta see how to do it.
The new transparent background of the Shining Through theme is really, really cool! You gotta jump through a couple of hoops to get it to work. You Gotta See This! performs this magic by saving the panographs as a layered PNG file instead of flattened JPG like nearly every other app. JPGs are nearly always smaller in file size (the number of of bytes, not the dimensions of the photograph). PNG files, though support layers and transparency.
If you want transparency to work, you can’t share or email directly from the You Gotta See This! app. It emails or uploads a flattened file with a black background that’s also been reduced to about 1200 pixels wide in size.
Emailed from You Gotta See This. Click for full size.
The app saves huge, full-resolution files to your iPhones camera roll, though. To view and share your panograph in all of its transparent coolness, email it from your Photo Library. Syncing to your laptop, desktop or iPhoto will also save the full-size image with transparent background.
Check out the main image above. You Gotta See This! also puts some cool transparency in the outer couple of panels as well.
Be careful when emailing. Full size transparent panographs can be data hogs. The main image above weighs in at about 4.6 MBs on my iPhone. The image with the black background which was emailed from You Gotta See This was much smaller at 573 KB.
You Gotta See This! is a pretty cool app that I use to create some great alternatives to traditional panos.. It’s definitely an app with a lot of “Wow!†factor when you show your panographs off to your non-iPhone bearing friends.
You Gotta See This! is $1.99 and is compatible with iPhone 4 and iPod touch (4th generation). Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
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