I have been teaching photography for around 7 years now and in that time, plenty of people have asked about lens hoods. Most high-end lenses come with a lens hood. The lens hood was designed to help combat lens flare from overpowered light sources that are in the shot (like the sun). As lens technology gets better and better, there is less need to use a lens hood. But, for the last few years, photographers have actually wanted lens flares in their images. The best way to get that look was to add it in a program like photoshop in post-processing. But what about on a mobile device? Well, there are a few apps that can help you out. The main one I use in Lens Distortions.
Lens Distortions arguably solves this lack of lens flare problems. Phone photographers don't like sitting down at computers because we do everything on a tablet or a phone instead. And for those photographers that like to edit their photos (even those shot on a camera) on a mobile device, Lens Distortions makes a lot of sense.
Features
For this review, I've used Adobe Lightroom mobile to do the edits on the photo and then used Lens Distortions to add all of the distortions and effects to the images.
Firstly, this is a free app, to a point. You can download the app and use it for free, but with only a handful of effects to use. The app costs about AUD$35 per year for the full plethora of features… and there are quite a few, over 350 at the time of writing this.
What can this app do? Well it can do quite a bit actually.
Lets go through a few of these features (or distortions).
Light Hits are what you will often see when looking through a viewfinder of a camera. These are broken down into three groups, Classic light hits, Principle light hits and Light hits. These are basically the look of lens flares that camera companies try to eliminate from modern lens glass. To be honest, most of these are fantastic. Where you would use them, will depend highly on the photo you’re about to use them on.
Here is an example of one of the classic light hits.
Light Volume has a couple of sub tools in its bag of tricks. Particulate and Soft light.
All of the filters / tools are very simple to use and intuitive to use. All of them use usual finger gestures applicable to your mobile device.
Very intuitive, live interface.
After each effect has been put in place, you then have the option for how much that effect will have. Brightness, opacity, strength and many more options to give you just the look you’re after.
Lens Distortions is available for both iOS and Android. Its also available for desktop Photoshop plugins and even has options for video on desktop. We are only interested in the mobile app for our phone photos and it does a pretty good job on these.
In conclusion, I am a huge fan of Lens Distortions. I love the ease of use and more intuitive nature of the app. For the sake of AUD$35 per year to have the option to give your images so much more atmopsphere, its absolutely worth it.
