From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Enhance photos with Perfectly Clear - iPhone Tutorial

From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Enhance photos with Perfectly Clear

“

- [Sean] Hey everybody, Sean Duggan here. And this week on Mobile Photography Weekly, we're going to take a look at an app that let's you apply some simple one-tap enhancements to your photos. But behind the scenes of those one-touch adjustments, there are multiple corrections, and some sophisticated image analysis at play. The app is called Perfectly Clear, and it's from Athentech. Perfectly Clear is an Android app, but there is an iOS version that goes by another name. It's called LUCiD. There are some minor interface differences between the two, but the features and the functionality are essentially identical. For this episode, we'll be checking out the Android version, Perfectly Clear. So if you're somebody who wants to quickly improve the look of your photos, without having to spend too much time fiddling around with a bunch of different sliders, this may be the type of app that you'd really appreciate. Perfectly Clear is both an image enhancement as well as a camera app. And it has some really interesting camera features including HDR, panorama, and a portrait mode that uses face-recognition to take a shot when the subjects eyes are open, or when they're smiling. In this episode however, we're just going to be looking at the enhancement capabilities that it offers. So the first thing to do after you've opened an image into Perfectly Clear, is tap on that little magic brush button down at the bottom to apply a basic fix. And Perfectly Clear will give you a overlay that'll let you slide back and forth to see the before version, and the after version. Or as the app likes to refer to it, as you can see up above there, original and better. So essentially what it's going to be doing is increasing the contrast a little bit, maybe boosting the color saturation or adjusting the brightness if the image needs to be brightened up, or perhaps darkened down. If you open up an image that already has really good contrast, really good color saturation, and an overall really good exposure, you may not see a very dramatic result in terms of the correction that it applies. Now one thing that I'd like to do with this image here is apply a slight adjustment to the color tint. So what I'm going to do is tap the pencil which gets me into the second screen of editing controls. And I'm going to tap on adjust, and here we can see all the different types of adjustments that we could apply. Up at the top there, we have exposure, and we have depth. Vibrancy, sharpen, and then here are the thermometers. That's the color tint, and that's the one I'm going to adjust here. Just going to turn that up a little bit, just to warm up the look of the foliage in the hillside there, just because I think that it definitely looks a lot better, and a lot more like what it really looked like on that summer day. Below the thermometers is noise reduction, we don't really have any noise in this image, so I'm going to leave that turned off. And then down below that, these are all adjustments that would apply to portraits. And we'll take a look at that in a little bit. So I think overall, that is a nice correction on this image here. Just going to tap the little save button up in the upper-right, and we'll save that out. Alright, let's go and take a look at another image, and apply one of these other presets that we have down at the bottom. So for this image of the barn, it's a little bit back-lit. You can see the light coming in from behind, and to the left of the barn. I'm going to tap the pencil to go right into the secondary editing screen. And I don't even have to tap on the Fix Dark preset down below for Perfectly Clear to analyze this image and see that it indeed was too dark, and it has applied a nice adjustment to brighten that up. So you can see we can see a lot more detail in the barn, and the foliage in the foreground looks a lot better. So definitely a good adjustment for that image. Let's go and take a look at a picture that could benefit from an adjustment to its color tint, or color balance. So this shot was taken just before the sun came up. You can see that bright glow there on the top of the ridge. But it's a little bit too cool, so let's tap the pencil button, and see what Perfectly Clear thinks of this. And it also thinked that the image was too cool, 'cause you can see that it has definitely warmed it up, and made it look a lot better. It's also adjusted the contrast in the bushes there, between the gravel sandbar, and the hillside. You can see that the contrast is much better there. So definitely an improvement there for that image. Okay, let's go and get a portrait image and explore some of the options in the Beautify preset. Alright, I'm going to tap on the pencil button, and we'll see what type of corrections Perfectly Clear thinks this image needs. So it's done a really nice job there, let's slide this before and after slider back and forth. It's done a good job of smoothing the skin, removing the shadows under the eyes. And there's a very slight bit of face-slimming going on if you look at the woman's cheek there on the left side. So overall, I think it's done a really nice job there. It's a very naturalistic looking enhancement of this image. It doesn't look overdone, it doesn't look artificial. Very very flattering, I think she'd be very pleased with this. Let's tap on the Beautify preset and actually see if that does anything different. So you can see there it did slim her face down a little bit more. And if we tap on adjust, we can see what other adjustments have been applied. So let's just take a quick look at these. We have skin tone. We have the Perfectly Smooth skin-smoothing slider. This is blemish removal. There really are no blemishes on this subject here, so I'm just going to turn that one off. And then we have forehead shine, or shine removal. So that's a common issue in some types of pictures, especially those taken outdoors under bright sun, on warm days. Again, we really don't have that in this picture so I'm just going to turn that off. And then here's that face slimming. And so you can see how that's working right there. Again, what it's doing is it's recognizing the structure of the face, and only applying the slimming in those areas. I'm actually not going to apply much face slimming at all here, 'cause I don't think she needs it. And then the other options we have down here are teeth whitening, that's the mouth. Really no teeth in this image. Red eye removal, eye enhance. Which is going to brighten and kind of add clarity to the eyes. Eye enlarge, and then here's that dark circle removal. And that definitely, I think, is one of the more flattering adjustments that it's made here. But I'm not going to remove them all the way because it is natural to have some shading under the eye. So something like that looks pretty good. And then finally the last one here, which is not turned on, is the catch light. So if you want to enhance the catch light in the eye, assuming there is a noticeable catch light, you can do that with this slider. Really are no catch lights in this eye that we're able to enhance. There are catch lights there, but this slider's just not doing too much on them. Perfectly Clear for Android, and LUCiD, which is the iOS version of the app, employ some pretty impressive content, and tonal recognition to analyze your photo. And then, through one of it's main presets, apply an adjustment based on what it feels a particular image needs. In many scenarios, it does a really good job with just a single tap. And you can always fine-tune things with the adjust sliders. If you want to apply this same technology to photos that you take with your other cameras, Athentech also offers a desktop version of Perfectly Clear that has a lot more controls and features. It's available for both Windows and Mac, either as a standalone app, or as a plugin for Lightroom, PhotoShop, and PhotoShop Elements.

Contents