"Mexpose" -- Double Exposure App for iPhone / iPad out now
I love photography and I love experimenting with new techniques and tools. But nowadays I take most of the pictures with my iPhone camera and edit them directly on my iPhone and iPad, before uploading them and sharing them with my family and friends. That's why we created Mexpose — an advanced photo editing app that allows you to create beautiful double and multiple exposures, yet is simple to use.
The Mexpose icon: it's all about composition
In the past I've been running around with my DSLR and sitting hours in front of Photoshop and Lightroom trying to get the best out of my pictures. But times have changed. Mobile cameras keep getting better and better with every smartphone generation and the processing power of mobile devices is slowly catching up with traditional desktops. But more important: my iPhone is always with me.
In the last twelve months I shot nearly ten times as many pictures with my iPhone than I did with my Nikon D80. I'm sure for many of you the ratio is even bigger. In effect I started searching for nice apps that let me do some advanced photo composition/editing I used to do in Photoshop/and or Lightroom.
For those of you familiar with analog photography, double exposure is a quite common and simple, yet very powerful technique to create stunning pictures and effects. In digital photography, some DSLRs usually let you do simple double exposures out-of-the-box, but to experiment with the technique I often ended up using Photoshop to create double exposure effects, where I could freely experiment with the composition and the brightness, contrast and saturation of the two images. In Mexpose I wanted to have the same type of freedom.
First: composition. How the two images should overlap is probably the single most important step in creating a double exposure. That's why in Mexpose you can freely pan, zoom an rotate both your foreground and your background image.
A clean minimalistic interface tailor made for creating double exposures
Second: exposure. The exposure of an image defines how much light is allowed to be captured by the camera. This creates the typical "cutout effect" you often see on double exposures. However using exposure you can also create more subtile effects that define the mood of the image. The contrast and saturation sliders in combination with the exposure slider will help you in this regard.
Exposure, contrast and saturation sliders let you control the mood of your image
While experimenting with an early prototype I discovered I needed another slider: the vignette. Since it's so simple to experiment with double exposures using Mexpose the two photos in my compositions often ended up only partly overlapping. The vignette slider was a simple solution to remove these ugly image borders. Since you can do double exposures using the high key or the low key approach, the vignette slide gives you a soft black border when you pull it to the left side, and a white one if you pull it to the right. Actually, now I miss a vignette slider in Photoshop :-)
Mexpose is available for both iPhone and iPad here.
jbbartram-illu
origamiaround