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Most high-end phones today include a portrait mode for your photos. This mode intelligently distinguishes the foreground and background of the photo, highlighting the former and applying a blur or distortion effect to the latter. But what about mobiles that don't have this feature? The solution comes in the form of a free application and reproduces this effect almost perfectly on any photo.
After Focus, the application for portraits
As the title indicates, After Focus is an application focused exclusively on transforming our photos and applying the effect of portrait mode to them. The app revolves around this idea and the functions they offer us are related to this concept. Its use adapts to any type of user, since it has an automatic and a manual mode to capture the close-up.
After Focus has three different types of adjustable distortion, bokeh effect, and even filters. The latter are special because they allow you to differentiate the filter in the foreground and the one in the background. After Focus also features a splash color mode; this refers to a black and white photo with a single object or color highlighted. After Focus is available for free for Android, although it has a paid version without ads and with higher resolutions for your photos for € 1.50. On iOS, only the pro version is sold for 1.09 euros.
How to use After Focus
As we mentioned before, After Focus has two types of foreground selection: smart and manual. Although the manual mode is more complex and takes longer, the finish is much better. Still, we will explain the use of the two modes, starting with the smart one.
Smart mode
To begin, we must choose the photograph that we want to retouch in the main menu of the app, or take one at the moment. This step is exactly the same for the two modes.
When choosing the photo, an interface with different tools will appear. Sorted from top to bottom are the foreground selection, the background selection, the background selection, the foreground brush, the eraser, the zoom, and the layer display.
The first thing to do on this screen is to select the foreground area. It is not necessary to follow an exact outline, just roughly trace the area to be highlighted.
The next thing is to select the background tool and select the entire area that we want between the foreground and the background. We select schematically because the smart mode will recognize the areas that we want to leave in the background. Another tip for this tool is to use it to do the outline, since it is weird if it is not done that way.
Finally, we mark the background with a line or two and touch up the areas that do not convince us and click on ready.
Manual mode
In manual mode, the only thing that changes is the tools interface. We will see that the brush and the eraser are replaced by four different brush sizes. The first step is also to mark the foreground, but this time we will have to draw the entire area to be highlighted.
After this, we draw the area in the background. Remember that in manual mode it is necessary to be precise, and for this there are tools such as the layer selector or the zoom.
For the background we do not need to select anything, since the app assumes that everything that is not drawn is background. So we just have to hit ready.
After this point, the two modes become one again. We are in the final touch-up window. From here we can edit our photo, adding filters and other things.
When we are done, we will only have to click on save and we will have our photo ready. As you can see, the process is easy and only takes a photograph and creativity.
