I do have reviews of quite a lot of professional software on this blog, but today, lets have a look at something focused more at the beginners and those, who don’t want to spend long time to learn how to do quick edits.

What is Fotojet?

Fotojet is an online photo editor and a collage maker. It works completely in your browser and you don’t have to install anything. You just upload your photos, do changes and download them back to you PC through your browser.

What can you do?

There are three main parts. Collage maker, Graphic designer and Photo editor. Each one is for when you are trying to do something a bit different.

Collage maker

As the name suggest, here you can make photo collages. You can choose from many basic layout and tweak them, or choose one of the more elaborate ones with photo backgrounds. Adding photos is easy and immediate, you just upload them from the PC or Facebook, and then just drag and drop them into the collage.

Graphic Designer

The Graphic Designer part is for creating posters, cards, promos and similar, already form predefined presets. It’s again as easy as drag and drop. You just choose the design you want, drag the photos into it to replace the example ones, and change the text and colors. That’s it.

Photo Editor

As the name suggest, this is the place to do photo editing. It goes from basics like Crop and Resize, up to Dehaze and Sharpen. You can also use the tools from the other two parts, and enhance the photos with Text, Clipart, Overlays and more.

 
All these parts are separate, so you can have a different photo opened in all of them at once. Also, If you want to be done quickly, you can use and auto-fill option for the collage and designs, that will just use random photos from the one you uploaded. Photojet allows to save your results in jpg or png file format.

Strangely I could not find how to add masks to images. You can use the ones that are already part of the presets, but you can’t make any new ones (or I really missed it somewhere).

Free vs. Paid

You may have noticed some small crowns on the screenshots. That marks the premium/paid content. Fotojet can be used completely for free, but some of the presets in collage and designer, and some of the advanced edits are limited for the paid customers. Still, especially in the collages and designer, you can do a lot for free. You pay only if you want any of the premium features.

How is it and when to use it

Fotojet is simple to use and easy to learn. The tools just popup by your cursor when you select something to edit, and while it offers quite a lot, it’s quite streamlined and not hard to get the hang off. It can take only seconds to create a new collage, or a new promo poster for you Facebook page.

I would not use it for some crazy elaborate photo editing, but if I had to suggest an easy way to create for instance blog banners, promotions, quick photo effects for someone with a blog, who is scared of Photoshop, I would show them this. Or if you just want to give a bit of flair or retro style to you Facebook posts. I even seen similar result to the ones I got here around the web, so it’s probably used a lot this way.

You can check out Fotojet at fotojet.com

You may have noticed that some of my reviews start with a note, that I was a backer of the product on Kickstarter. For those unfamiliar, Kickstarter is a crowd-funding site, where companies and people present products they want to produce and people fund them with the start money they require for it. In reward, they usually get the product specified.

And since they are many products there specifically for photographers, I thought that today I will share few thoughts and points about Kickstarter and the campaigns there, that one should know before backing any. And if you are curious, I personally backed 19 projects so far.

1. Kickstarter is not a store
Many people who first time try Kickstarter are misinformed what it is. You are not buying a product, you are investing into a company. There is always a chance that you will get nothing. In the past, even bigger companies had problems fulfilling promises. The best is to be aware of this right from the start.

2. Delays will happen
Even good planed Kickstarter campaigns have delays. If you see that a date is promised when the product will be shipped, immediately add 2 months to it. That around the average I seen by most campaigns that delivered their products. Never ever expect that you will get your product on an exact date. Just right now, one of the projects I backed is 6 months late, and one is around 2 years.

3. Avoid big promises
Be careful when the project promises too much. Especially if its a companies first campaign. If I see a company like Peak Design, that had many successful campaigns, which delivered on time, I’m not worried. If I see a one man company promising too much, I rather stay away.

4. Bid early
If you know you want something, bid early. Most campaigns offer a so called early bird reward, where you can get the same reward for less (still, remember this is not a shop). So if you bid early, and all works as it should, you get the reward for less. And since the money is not collected right away, you still will have 30 to 60 days to cancel you pledge.

5. Look at comments and other projects
When the company has multiple campaigns on Kickstarter, is always great to check out the other ones, to see how it did. If you see that they have project with only unhappy comments and not delivered promises, you should avoid them.

6. Expect changes
Products on Kickstarter are usually still in the development process. There may be small and there may be big changes. Sometime you can even influence them if you message the developer or leave a good comment.

7. Don’t expect many updates
I’m not sure why some backers get crazy nervous when there is not an update from the company every second day. One update every month is more than enough. You don’t really need that many details, and bothering people with stupid comments when they try to work is not helping anything. If there is no update for a longer time, it can mean problems, but it can also mean nothing. Crying wolf too soon can only damage the project and can end worse for you in the end. To the same point, if a company promises and update and its 5 minutes late, please don’t start asking for it.

8. Take postage and taxes into account
This is similar to online shopping. Always take import taxes (if you are not in the country of the company) and postage into account. I skipped many projects just because the postage was same or even bigger than the product cost. Some companies get around the import taxes by posting from multiple locations, but you can’t be sure about that at the time of your pledge.

9. Check your pledge before the end
As the campaign ends, some companies offer cheaper options to drive more pledges. Also, there are always some cancellations, so you can have a chance to change you pledge for a cheaper one with the same reward.

10. Don’t pledge if you can’t take the risk
Always remember there is a risk. Don’t pledge if you can’t take it or don’t have the spare means to do it.

And to end, stats for the 19 projects I backed. On 4 I canceled my pledge, I either found a better one, or changed my mind. 2 were unsuccessful. 6 delivered, with an average of around 2 months delay. One is 2 years overdue, but that was a game, and I did not had that great of expectations. And the other 6 should deliver this year. Two were delayed, by 2 and 6 months, but now should be already on the way, and others are still in production stage.

Kickstarter is a great site with great products, but before you pledge for one, know what you can expect and what can happen. Always.

If you have not noticed it yet, I really like Kickstarter. One can find so many new and interesting stuff there. Always. And when one actually understands that it’s not an online store, it can be a lot of enjoyment seeing on how projects unfold.

But why I mention it today? It’s because I received a reward from one of my recently backed projects, Blilps.

What are Blips?

Blips are small microscopic lenses that you stick on the back of you smartphone, to radically change the magnification level you are getting. There are three lenses, a macro, micro and ultra, each one with different magnification. I got only the first two, as ultra was added later, and I did not change my pledge.

How to use them?

The lenses come in a tiny package, with few instructions. Not that you need anything more. To use the lens, you just unstick it from the package and stick it onto the phone camera. Hard to say how many times you can stick and unstick them, but the maybe 20 times I tried it worked fine. They held fine when directly on the phone, but on phone with a skin applied they tended to get loose.

There is a special camera app from the manufacturer, but you don’t really need it. The one thing that it does is to allow to lock focus, but you can get the exact same thing by just using manual focus in any other photo app.

So the best way to focus is not to use autofocus, but to lock the focus at one distance and then just move closer or further with the phone, until you get the focus you want. I personally had quite problems with this, as my hands just shake too much, and with such shallow DOF it’s easy to just move the phone by a tiny bit and loose the focus. Doing this from a holder or a small tripod would result in much better results. Also using a burst mode can help, as the phone takes many photos quickly, so you get shots with different planes of focus.

Macro & Micro

The focus distance for the macro lens is 10-12mm and micro is 6mm. That really is close. Depending on the camera position on your phone, it can result that you are shading your own subject.

Here are some of my results. All show a normal photo (around 10cm from the subject), a photo with the macro lens attached, and a photo with the micro lens attached.

I need to experiment more with them, trying to get better results (and I usually don’t shoot macro :)), and if I get some good ones, you will see them on this blog.

Overall

Blips are an interesting product. I don’t think the goal here is to get a pro level macro shots, but more about having fun with a new stile of photography, without having to buy a very pricey macro lens. You can find out more about blips on the Smartmicrooptics website.

Some time ago I wrote about how to avoid people in your photos (you can check the post here), and today I thought I will show you an example of one of the techniques I mentioned here. So today I will show you how to remove people from your photos manually, using multiple exposures.

1. Taking the photos

It’s hard to say how many photos you will need. It depends a lot on the area you are trying to photograph. If the area is filled with a stream of moving people no amount of photos will be enough. But if the amount of people is more moderate, and you can see the parts of the scene you want to photograph, you can do it.

The best tactic is to first take a shot and check it, trying to remember the spots that contain people. Then without changing the camera settings or composition, wait until one of those spots is empty, and take another shot. Wait for another spot, and take another shot. Continue doing so, until you have a photo with empty space for every spot you need. Having more photos than less is usually much better.

Let’s look at an example I took in Lyon, France. The Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière has quite many people going in and out during the day. At night it was easy to avoid them, but during the day, I had to do more work. I set up for a vertorama, and while a single exposure for the top image was enough (no people there :)) I had to do multiple for the bottom. For this, I took quite a lot, 18 shots in total, just to be sure I have everything.

In the end I used only 5 of these shots, just the ones I needed for the whole image. Here I had a bit of luck that all people were moving. If there are some just standing around or sitting, you may need to retouch them out in the end.

2. Blending them

So once the photos are selected, we have to load them all into layers in Photoshop. Here using the masks one can easily blend in parts of every image, to remove the people.

Let’s look again at the example. Here, you may notice I also loaded the combined vertorama (the top combined with one of the bottom images, that had the least people) as the base. This does not change much, just one has to make sure the photos are properly aligned. Other than that, it’s the same process as by a normal image. If you don’t know how to load files into layers in Photoshop, check this guide on how to do it.

The next step is to add a black layer mask (a mask that hides everything). Either choose a layer and go to Layer/Layer Mask/Hide all or hold down Alt and click on the Add layer mask button (circle inside a square in the bottom right of layers window). Once you have all the layers except the first one hidden you can continue.

Now choose a white brush, 100% opacity, 0% hardness, with a size around 100px (depends on the size of your photo). No we can start to remove people. Just choose one area you want to work with on the base photo, look through the other layers (holding down shift and clicking on the mask will temporary disable it, so you can see the photo), where the are is empty, and then start painting with white on that layers mask, over the part you want to hide. Don’t forget, that people also have reflections and shadows, so you have to remove those also.

Continue doing this for every area you need, until you have a completely empty photo (that is if you had enough source images :))

And thats all for this guide, for more, feel free to check out the guides category of the blog.

An update for the HDR software Aurora HDR has been teased for a while now, and today Macphun opened up pre-orders for the new, 2017 version. And as they usually do, they are running quite a promotion with it, where you will get a bunch of extra stuff (video from Trey Ratcliff, 1 year of Smugmug and more), when you pre-order before the 29the September release date. They are also offering a discounted upgrade price, if you already own the current version.

What is Aurora HDR

Aurora HDR is and all in one solution for creating and editing HDR photos (regrettably, still only for MAC OS), which combines many tools from dedicated HDR tone-mapping programs with features usually reserved to programs like Photoshop and Lightroom. I did a review for the 2016 version and you can find more there.

You can also enroll in a free course to learn more about HDR and Aurora HDR, taught by a great photographer Jim Nix on the Macphun site here.

Whats new?

Aurora HDR 2017 offers many new additions compared to the old one. And they are sticking mostly to the theme, by trying even more to create a complete work-flow in one program. The new features are: new luminosity mask controls, new tone mapping engine, batch processing, polarizing filter, new presets, new layer blend modes, faster raw processing and more. You can check out a video describing them in detail on Macphun website here.

As I mentioned in my review of the 2016 version, Aurora HDR provides many features and creates some very nice results. With the introduction of the new features, it offers even more than before. So if you have not yet tried it out, I would suggest geting the trial, and if you use it, you probably already know if you need to upgrade.
Download the trial and pre-order on Macphun website here.

(Please note, while I had access to a preview version of Aurora HDR 2017, I did not have currently a Mac OS system I could use. That’s why these screen shots were provided by Macphun. A more detailed review of Aurara HDR 2017 from me will come later.)