Dan Marcolina’s excellent book, iPhone Obsessed – Photo Editing Experiments with Apps, is quite simply an excellent, step-by-step guide to apping your photos on your iPhone. The iPad companion app to the book, iObsessed Companion, has been described as “stunning”.
The iPad-only app was recently updated and is on sale now in the App Store for only $2.99.
The book, iPhone Obsessed – Photo Editing Experiments with Apps, is an instant education in production or “apping” on the iPhone. It guides you step-by-step through the production process.
Each chapter introduces apps you’ll need along with brief highlights of each app. You’re then introduced to each photograph and given easy to follow tutorials on how to recreate the same effects on your iPhone.
The book is interactive on any iDevice with a camera and an internet connection. Microsoft tags are scattered throughout the book. When read by the free Tag Reader from Microsoft app, you are taken to the book’s mobile-friendly interactive websites for tutorial videos, free downloads, and more information and direct links to apps.
Rather than take you through what each app does, the book covers a wide range of styles and then shows you the tools and techniques to recreate them. The book covers grunge, toon, paint, HDR and many other styles, as well as showing you tips on how to create great-looking vignettes, blurs and lighting styles. I like how the emphasis is on the workflow and that many of the advanced techniques take you through steps using several apps.
Another thing I really like about the book are Dan’s thoughts on many of the photos. Not only do you get into his head on the story behind the shot, but as you read his thoughts about the production of the photo, he shares his insights on why he made certain moves on an image, why he used particular apps, and what he wanted to achieve with his final result.
The book was published a few months ago – an eternity in app years. Many of the apps have been updated since the book’s release. How does it hold up? Extremely well. The book is written as a tutorial. Concepts are given more emphasis than screen-by-screen instruction, helping the book stay relevant and making the book a useful reference over time, giving you the tools to use similar apps and tools to make the same types of moves. The book is like having a mentor where you learn the secrets of apping, not the lost manual for 47+ apps.
iPhone Obsessed is an instant education in learning advanced techniques to really app up your images. Learning by experimentation is fun. iPhone Obsessed immerses you in the techniques. iPhone Obsessed has great tips and techniques that will help nearly any iPhoneographer.
The iPad App
The app, iObsessed Companion Edition One, expands on the book and shows many new image concoctions including detailed formulas for some of the unexplained images in the book. The app features step-by-step video tutorials right in-line with the featured images. It’s not designed to replace the book, but to enhance it.
Together, both the book and the app make for a comprehensive education in production and image edition on the iPhone. Together, they are a shortcut to learning better, more creative production on the iPhone. Highly recommended.
The book lists for $29.99 but is currently available new from Barnes & Noble for only $19.49. The app is currently on sale for $2.99 – a savings of $2.00.
BN.com link: iPhone Obsessed: Photo editing experiments with Apps
Requirements: Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later
=M=
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Disclosure: Life In LoFi is a BN.com affiliate. If you purchase the book through the link in this post, we get a small commission. That’s not why I recommended the book, though. The book really rocks. =M=
