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What's New in Flare 2.2

The latest update of Flare 2 adds two all new filters, and improves three of the existing filters.

The new Colorfilm filter tries to emulate the characteristics of saturated color film and is a new approach to adding saturation. We published a blog post about this exciting new filter a few days ago, if you want to know more about it, click here to read.

The new Timestamp filter simulates the time stamp (or date stamp) found in some older film cameras. The visuals of this filter are very close to the original, resulting in a classic vintage look. We tried very hard to get the look right. Here's a photo and a closeup of a timestamp created with Flare 2.2:

BTW. The date and time are read directly from the EXIF data of the photo, so you get the right timestamp automatically.

We improved the Texture filter with the ability to blur textures and set the strength of the blur. This feature improves the possibilities of the filter a lot, as you are able to fine-tune and adjust the textures much better than before.

The improved Van Zesen filter has a new parameter to change the translation strength of of the color planes. This also gives you much more control over the results of this filter.

The improved Gaussian Blur filter has a new option to enable a seamless edge blur.

And finally Cropping has a new setting to lock the aspect ratio to the one of the original photo.

Hope you enjoy the new features.

Wolfgang Ante

Rethinking Saturation

In the upcoming version 2.2 of Flare 2 we will add a new filter that we are very proud of, a filter that uses a new approach to an old classic: Saturation.

The classic approach to Saturation is a slider that simply lets you increase the saturation of each pixel in the image. And as everyone knows this one is a tricky beast. Of course adding saturation makes the photo pop out more, but adding too much will look unnatural. Balance is important, but more often than not when you move that slider, the results will not be exactly what you want.

At this point the color film nerds will come out and tell you that this is typically digital and that their beloved XY film would have the pop without the comic oversaturation. And they are right, that's actually true!

So, what is it that saturated color film does, that the classic approach to saturation cannot do? And the answer is actually quite straight forward: The classic saturation slider works linear -- all the same on all the colors in your photo. But that is not how we see color. Our eye's color perception is different between light/dark, and high/low saturated areas of a photo.

So we tried to do saturation better. After lots of research and experimentation, the result is our new filter called 'Colorfilm'. Here's an example, to give you a sneak peek at what's coming:

This is the original image. Interesting photo, but what about giving these ladies in pink a little more pop? Ok, let's try classic saturation first...

So we turn up the saturation slider until the pink is where we want it. But we'll notice one thing: In this photo it will mainly work on the pink and the green. That is because the rest of the photo hasn't got that much saturation. So yes, pop is there, but it doesn't look that real anymore.

Now lets try our new 'Colorfilm' filter. With it all of the areas in the photo look more saturated. The wall on the right has more warm yellow from the sunshine, the wall on the left has more cold blue from the shadow, but the pink and green are not overdone.

What we do is a perceptual saturation increase, instead of a linear one. This will also lift the shadows a bit, which is not something we actively do, it's just an effect of human color perception.

One caveat though: Minor color artefacts in lower saturated areas with subtle gradients will be emphasized. What I am talking about is the sky in JPG images. If you see artefacts in the sky, try loading the RAW image or an uncompressed TIFF export of the same photo, and the artefacts will be gone.

There is lots more in version 2.2 of Flare 2, out soon. This time we wanted to give you a preview on this particular feature before release, because we think this is a significant new filter worth its own blog post.

Wolfgang Ante

Two new analog effects for the BEST OF collection

One of the goals with Flare was the ability to create high-quality, desktop-class effects, subtle but still distinct.

To showcase this we added two new effects to our curated BEST OF selection in Flare 2. These new effects try to recreate the look of analog shots in a very subtle way, meant to be used on your best shots.

Original image, shot with a Sony α7II.

Edited with the new Dreamy effect.

Edited with the new Colorchrome effect.

If you like the subtle mood of analog photography, these two new effects are for you.

Wolfgang Ante

こんにちは & Guten Tag!

We are happy to announce that Flare 2 is available in Japanese and German language now. Just update to the latest version 2.1.1 from the Mac App Store to have these new localizations available to you.

Wir freuen uns, daß Flare 2 ab sofort in deutscher und japanischer Sprache zur Verfügung steht. Einfach auf die neueste Version 2.1.1 im Mac App Store updaten und schon stehen die neuen Sprachen zur Verfügung.

この度、Flare 2のドイツ語と日本語バージョンが間もなく使用できることになりましたので発表いたします。新しいバージョン2.1.1をMac App Storeでアップデートするだけですぐに新しい言語が使えます。

Four new effects and more

So here is the latest from Flare 2: We just added four new effects to 'Best Of'. And we were featured among the 'BEST OF 2014' apps in the Mac App Store!

Lets start by thanking Apple for once again choosing Flare to be included in their selection of the best apps of the year in the Mac App Store. The original Flare was picked in 2011, and now Flare 2 made it again in 2014! So if you haven't downloaded Flare 2 yet, this is the time to give it a try.

Today we are adding more effects available immediately in the 'Best Of' selection inside Flare 2. Just open the effects panel, choose 'Best Of' and you will find four new effects available:

Chic

With warm color toning and soft borders this preset is ideal to put the center of the photo into focus.

Old & Dirty

A strong border, a bit of added warmth, and lots of other subtle things to create the look of an aged photo.

Vintage Film

A distinctive color effect with lots of contrast to create the moody, dramatic photo look of old film shots.

Warm Lightleak

Need to add some pep? Try adding this effect, or use it as a starting point for further experiments.

Hope you like the new effects!

Wolfgang Ante

What’s new in Flare 2.1

The first update of Flare 2 is out, and it adds three great new features: A Magnifying Loupe to look at the fine details, a new filter called Hair & Dust, and a new parameter that makes Simple Edit even simpler.

The Magnifying Loupe lets you examine the fine details of an effect by showing the area of the photo underneath the mouse cursor in original size. Turn it on by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the bottom toolbar and move your mouse cursor over your photo to peek at particular areas and check your editing on the pixel level.

The new Hair & Dust filter simulates dirt on a scanner, but unlike a simple texture overlay this filter gives you complete control over how much dirt you want. :)

This is like an interactive texture, giving you much more control.

The new On/Off State Simple Edit parameter enables you to quickly turn on and off any filter from the Simple Edit popover. This is especially useful for Borders, Frames, and Lightleaks.

Sometimes these effects just don't fit, so now you may turn them off very quickly from the Simple Edit popover. This is how it shows up in Simple Edit when enabled (in this example to turn off the Border quickly):

We didn't limit this to Borders, Frames, and Lightleaks though. You may turn this on for every filter.

BTW. The reason we haven't updated the Best Of effects with this useful parameter yet is that for this to work correctly you need version 2.1 of Flare 2. If you encounter problems with this feature, keep this in mind, and make sure you have updated all copies to the latest version.

Additionally this version also includes a few minor bug fixes.

Hope you enjoy the new features. Happy holidays, and there is more to come early next year!

Wolfgang Ante

Best Of

Flare 2 includes a new library of curated effects that will be updated constantly. We added two new effects today, so here is a closer look at how this works.

To go to our curated effects open the Effects panel on the right and select 'Best Of'. And that's it already. All the work of getting new effects is done automatically now. The effects in the 'Best Of' tab are updated via iCloud, so whenever we add new effects to this library they will download and be ready for you to use immediately.

We are using this feature for the first time, updating the list with two great new effects, called Vintage Galore and Analog Gallery:

Vintage Galore — combines several Vintage filters for a whirlwind of strong color correction

Analog Gallery — adds a warm, analog feeling and emphasizes the center, ideal for portraits

Enjoy!

Wolfgang Ante

A detailed look at the new filters in Flare 2

Beside the new and improved user interface, batch processing, speed improvements, and the companion iPhone app, there is lots of new stuff and improvements in the core filter engine of Flare, too. This post is about the new and the improved filters that add a lot of new possibilities to the already big arsenal of image manipulation tricks of the original Flare.

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Finally, Flare 2 has Tilt-Shift! And of course the rounded version called Soft Focus. Actually this is the fourth implementation of the filter we did (we never published the previous three ones), since we wanted to have this with the highest possible speed and quality, while keeping it easy to configure, and still being flexible enough. For example, a lot of other Tilt-Shift implementations lack the essential "In-focus Size" parameter that lets you adjust just how much of your photo is in focus.

Tilt-Shift creating the effect of a miniature scene

Speaking of easy to configure, lets look at the new Color Cast filter next: It allows you to adjust the midtones of your photo for the red, green, and blue channels independently. Now, this is what you usually will do with a Curves filter, if you'd only knew how that works! ;-) So we reduced this complex UI into three simple sliders that everyone will understand. Color Cast is especially useful to simulate the characteristics of old film. Kodachrome film has traditionally been emphasizing reds, while Fujifilm had a strong emphasis on green. Positive film tended to slightly emphasize the blue channel.

A Kodachrome simulation with Color Cast on the right

The new Highlights & Shadows filter is really handy to get more detail out of your photos, but it also helps with some filters that naturally increase contrast or clip highlights, and this new filter is a very effective way to work against these unwanted side effects, keeping all the details of your photo intact.

Hightlights & Shadows saving a very dark-lit photo

Next, we have added a whole new section of Vintage filters (you might know these from your iPhone), but we also added new Blending Masks, so combining these Vintage filters with masks and complete control of how much you want to add (with the Opacity slider), these filters can do a lot to finalize a great custom effect.

Several Vintage filters combined to create this color shift

And while we are at fine-tuning, here is an interesting insight into something we did in Flare 2: Some parameters, like Contrast, have a very non-linear perception. That means that very slight changes in Contrast will be immediately visible and noticeable, but the more you increase it the perception of the change isn't that big anymore. For this kind of parameter we have tweaked these sliders to be non-linear. What that means is that such a slider is very fine-grained at the beginning and then becomes more agressive towards the end. The result is a slider that gives you much better control, making it easier to create exactly the effect you desire.

Another subtle change was to split the Brightness/Contrast/Saturation filter into two new filters: Brightness & Contrast and Saturation & Vibrance. The new parameter Vibrance is another example of our fine-tuning efforts. It works like Saturation, but is less agressive on skin tones. A change in Saturation will give a photo more pop, but it easily looks overdone on human faces, so this is really great for portraits.

We have added a second filter for sharpening called Sharpen Luminance. This uses a different algorithm that is strong on the fine details of the photo. Its more crisp than the old Sharpen (that's still there of course, and better for edge enhancement). Sharpen Luminance is especially effective with a center mask and 50% opacity to set a focus on the middle of the photo.

Sharpen Luminance emphasizing the grain

In the special effects section we have added two new filters called Bokeh Rings and Van Zesen. Bokeh Rings will put some colored, translucent rings on your photo. This is perfect to add a little bit of analog mood to your photo. Van Zesen will shift the three color planes of the image in different directions and with different rotations, creating the effect of a misaligned print and is based on an analog-digital technique, developed by Kay Röhlen. This will look especially good on photos with strong edges and contrasts.

Photo by Kay Röhlen

Finally, we added new textures, lightleaks, and borders — plus we added a new filter called Paper: This one is perfect to simulate the ever popular Polaroid border, but to have perfect control over this kind of border we didn't just add a static Polaroid border, we made a custom filter that lets you control the border size, corner radius, and inside shadow. Even choose a different texture. Because this kind of border is special, a static overlay will just not do it.

So, that is the roundup of the new filters in Flare 2. We kept to our initial vision, to have the highest quality filters in any effect app, we expanded our offering of filters, and improved the existing ones. As a result there is so much more you can do with Flare now, we replaced almost all of the initial default effects. We hope you like it as much as we do!

Wolfgang Ante

What's new in Flare 2

The original Flare was named Best of the Mac App Store in 2011. Now Flare 2 is here and features an improved workflow, a new user interface for Yosemite, curated collections of Effects that are updated monthly, and iCloud support so you can take your favorite effects with you wherever you go! Here is a detailed look at what's new in Flare 2:

The new effects view has improved a lot since the original Flare: It is blazingly fast now and with this will support hundreds of effects easily. For that we have added the ability to sort (for example, use sorting by date to always see your latest work) and to favorite effects. There are different views, from the familiar thumbnail view to a detail view, and a very compact list view.

All your effects will sync via iCloud automatically, so you will have them on all of your Macs (and other devices, but more about that later).

So, you might have heard about problems with iCloud and you may ask: Are my effects safe? And that is one of the reasons Flare 2 needs OS X Yosemite: We are using CloudKit, which is a new way to access iCloud that gives us much more control, and this way we could make sure your effects are safe. Glad you asked. :-)

We unified Presets (now called My Effects) and Snapshots in a single panel on the right, and we added a third one called "Best Of". These effects are coming in from the internet, and are our curated collection of the latest and greatest effects. If you used the original Flare, you might know we had a page on the website to browse and download more presets, but with Flare 2 this manual process has been completely automated and built into the app itself.

The next feature is one of my favorite new things in Flare 2, and we named it Simple Edit: This is a way to let you adjust the most important settings of an effect very quickly, without even opening the Advanced Edit panel. Select an effect, click on the Edit icon, and it will show a popover with a few parameters that let you adjust these settings very quickly. Please note that you do that while the effects panel on the right is still open.

And we moved the Master Opacity control to the bottom bar, so it is always accessible.

So, when you are ready to build your own effect, click on Advanced Edit in the Simple Edit popover to open the edit panel of Flare with all the nitty-gritty details. And here we find another favorite new feature, the Add Filter popover. Click the Plus icon on the bottom left to open it:

This popover is the new unified place to add a filter. We have categorized the old and many new filters in more groups, and we added a live preview. Hover over any of the filters and you will see a preview directly inside the popover of how that will look on this particular photo with this particular filter list.

Talking about new filters, we have added the following: Tilt-Shift and Soft Focus (there are apps out there that do just these two!), Highlight & Shadows, Paper (including, but not limited to, the ever popular Polaroid border), Saturation & Vibrance, Color Cast (really great for simulating analog film), Bokeh Rings, Sharpen Luminance, Van Zesen, and seven Vintage film filters. And while we were at it we have improved the following filters with new options: Brightness & Contrast, Lightleaks, Borders, Textures, and Scaling.

And we added five new Blending Masks that add much more flexibility for creating new effects.

Batch processing is another big new feature. Applies an effect to a batch of photos. The UI is again without any modes and doesn't get in your way.

Which leads to the next improvement, and that is to render exported images in the background. That is just a necessity if you try to export a batch of photos, but it also comes in handy when you are just working on one photo. Rendering is never blocking the app anymore, as it did in the original Flare. And there is more background rendering, like for the thumbnails in the effect panel, that is really smooth now.

The icing on the cake is what Yosemite gave us: A sleek interface that puts content first, very smooth animations in the UI, even speed improvements (well, it is 64-bit now, too). Plus, Yosemite supports two different interface themes in light and dark, and this is something that is just ideal for any photography app. The discussions about what's best are endless, and will never be decided, because in the end it all comes down to personal taste. That's why we put in extra-effort to support both. Now if it'd always be that easy to end a seemingly eternal argument. :-)

It is a bit daring to release an app for a new OS on the same day that OS is released, but what we did with Flare 2 is something that would not have been possible with Mavericks. We would have had to compromise, and our goal with Flare has always been to do the best possible effect app. It has been a while since the original Flare came out, and we knew we had to do something big to get back on top again. Flare 2 is this, but we needed Yosemite for that. So if you haven't upgraded yet, keep Flare 2 in mind, and come back when you have. Its worth it!

So ... are we done yet?

Well, no. We also wanted to add "one more thing"...

We always wanted this, but so far this has simply been impossible. This has changed with iOS 8 though, and when we learned about that at WWDC this year we were very excited. Finally we were able to sync the effects from our Macs to our iPhones, and have them with us "on-the-go".

To understand why this is huge and something new, let me explain a bit about the technical background: Sure, there are tons of effect and filter apps on the iPhone already. What Flare does is something much more advanced though. More than just applying some graduation curves, color shifts, and blending a few textures. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he used the term "desktop-class apps" to describe what's different to the apps on the iPhone compared to apps on other smartphones at that time. And this is also a perfect term for what Flare Effects is: It is "Desktop-class effects" on your phone.

For example, an effect like Daguerreotype is made up of approx. one hundred (!) Core Image filters chained together in a complex rendering tree. And then these filters do include some more advanced filters like Barrel Distortion, Sharpen, and Blur. To render this on OS X the app needs about 140 MB of memory. Now, if you do the same thing on iOS the app will be asked politely to stop this immediately, and when it doesn't, it will be terminated without any further notice. Also, Core Image on iOS 8 will now render big images by tiling them, but it will not accept a rendering tree the size of Flare's. At all. So we had to rewrite all the effects, and find some more tricks, and reduce the memory footprint to an absolute minimum.

Not surprisingly, this also helped the Mac version. When we were done with rewriting the filters we saw huge speed improvements on the Mac, too. So even if you don't use Flare Effects, this port made the Mac app much better.

Finally, let me add this: It would not have been possible to do this without the team, especially with the iOS companion app. After WWDC, when we decided to ditch our own Effect management and go with CloudKit, use all the new and exciting UI stuff in Yosemite, and try to bring desktop-class effects to the iPhone, we had a summer full of hard and incredibly intense work before us. Without adding Craig and Sean to help on the coding I would have never finished this on time (if you want to read more about this effort you may want to read Craig's blog post on furbo.org). Anthony's UI and UX design was just as brilliant as always! Last but not least, Talos and Travis, managing this huge effort has helped making Flare 2 a reality. Thank you, guys!

Now what are you waiting for? Go check it out! :-)

Wolfgang Ante

#flarefx

Flare 1.5

In a nutshell, version 1.5 brings a lot of new and exciting stuff to Flare: New presets, new borders, new and updated filters, Facebook sharing, and a bunch of smaller improvements and bug fixes.

Let's start with the 'Tin Type' preset: 'Just like 'Daguerreotype' before, this preset goes back into the history of photography, trying to emulate the collodion wet plate process introduced in 1850, that used wet collodion on tin sheets. Additionally exposures needed to be developed in under 15 minutes. This was a real mess! Unlike the original, our new default preset is just a click away. Here is what it looks like:

The Tin Type preset

'Instamatic' on the other hand goes back only a few decades, emulating another cheap plastic camera. Not necessarily that camera, the name actually came from combining Instagram with Hipstamatic, but voilá, we get the name of a classic Kodak camera. What a coincidence. ;-) Here is what it looks like:

The Instamatic preset

Beside these two new default presets there is a new effect called 'Profile Presets'. You'll find it in the Color Effects on the Edit tab. This effect will apply predefined color corrections to the image, and we start with three distinct presets. Here is what they look like:

Selective Warmness

Feelin' the Blues

Hipsteresque

Another addition is that the Rotation effect has an option that scales the image to fill the frame automatically. Before this you had to also add a Scaling effect to get to the same result, so this new option makes certain things one step easier.

And if you liked the Shuffle feature we introduced in version 1.3, we have added an option for if you want to add more punch: Just hold down the option key while clicking the shuffle icon in the presets tab, and you get a more intense effect.

Finally, with Mountain Lion 10.8.2, we support sharing your final image on facebook.

Plus, as usual, a few bugs fixed. Find the details in the version history.

Wolfgang Ante

Flare 1.3

After a long wait, Flare 1.3 is finally here. Here is a short overview of what's new:

The most visible new feature is Shuffle: This allows easily applyable variation on your presets. In the presets tab, select a preset, then click on the Shuffle icon:

This will change the settings of the effects that make up the preset just a little bit, creating a slightly different look. Continuously clicking the Shuffle button will bring the settings ever farther away from original. Great for experimenting without even going into the Edit tab! If things went into the wrong direction, just hit the Reset button.

Under the hood there is an even bigger change than Shuffle: Flare has a completely new final rendering engine. In a nutshell this means Flare is much more stable now. No huge image or overly complex preset should cause Flare to crash anymore.

The second under-the-hood change is the adoption of application sandboxing. This new technology in OS X Lion limits access of apps to some of your computer's resources. In the end, this will make security attacks more difficult, and therefore increase the trust you have in your computer.

Unfortunately, application sandboxing was still a moving target when I started working on it, and the first implementation from Apple meant Flare would lose a feature, and that would be syncing presets via Dropbox. A lot of effort went into new code to make the transition for people using the syncing feature as smooth as possible. Just when this version was ready, changes to application sandboxing made it possible to keep Dropbox syncing. So all of the migration code had to go again, and the code base needed to adopt the new API.

Making Flare a sandboxed application has taken a lot of time and this is the main reason for the delay in updates. The good news here is that now this is done, updates to Flare should come again more regularly.

Additionally there have been some important bug fixes and other improvements, of course. Please see the version history for a complete list of changes.

Last but not least, the presets download page has been updated with some new presets and clicking on the thumbnail will show a bigger preview now.

Wolfgang Ante

External Editor and new Presets

Version 1.2 that has recently been released added the ability to define Flare as External Editor for Aperture, iPhoto, and Lightroom. (instructions how to set this up are found here)

A few reviews on the Mac App Store said that users of Aperture or Lightroom do not need Flare. So why did we add this feature?

The reason is, while Aperture and Lightroom can do a lot of what Flare does, they do not offer borders, frames, lightleaks, textures, and blurs. Plus some color processing effects are easier to use in Flare, too. On the other hand Aperture and Lightroom manage your photo library, something Flare doesn't do at all.

We never saw Aperture or Lightroom as competition to Flare, and with version 1.2 we brought Flare as External Editor right into the RAW workflow of the big apps.

Today we released seventeen new presets created by users of Flare (click here to download), so let me take this opportunity to show you some of the new presets as an example of what Flare can do, that will add to the features of Aperture or Lightroom:

Apart from these very strong presets, I also like subtle presets that only change the colors and mood of a photo. Here are a few more examples from today's new presets:

Wolfgang Ante

Version 1.1

Flare 1.1 is out, and this time it adds some nice new default presets and textures. While the last two updates put the emphasis on feature improvements, like exporting to iPhoto and the ability to sync your presets via Dropbox, this release is all about adding new content to make your processed photos look even better. In the following I want to showcase some of the new possibilities.

Lets start with the new default presets. There are six new presets that will be added to your presets automatically. I want to highlight one preset here, and that is the Daguerreotype. This was the first commercially successful photographic process, the starting point of photography. David Lanham has created a complex preset to mimic the look of Daguerreotype photos, and the result is a showcase of what Flare can do.

Here is an example:

Flare is very flexible and powerful if you go into detail. It is great for one-click image enhancement, but you should try to create your own presets, too. The possibilities are endless.

Next are sixteen new borders and frames. A picture is worth a thousand words, but let me highlight the medium-format-photography frames, that have been added on request from users. Crop your photo to square format to make them look realistic.

Here are a few border examples:

One comment on frames though: Be sure to try the "Invert Frame" checkbox to switch between black and white background.

Finally, we have ten new lightleak textures. Our lightleaks have been praised for their realism and the new version adds even more realistic leaks as well as more adventurous ones.

Again, best to see an example:

With version 1.1 the possiblilities to process your photos got even richer. Please remember that there are more presets to download here: http://flareapp.com/presets

Hope you enjoy version 1.1!

Wolfgang Ante

SIMULATING THE HOLGA 120 TOY CAMERA

One of the big differences of Flare to simple effect apps is that you can edit the presets, and even build your own. Building your own presets needs a bit of practice though, so in this post I will explain step-by-step how to create a preset that mimics the look of photos shot with the Holga 120 toy camera.

Let me start by saying that the Holga does its thing with how the plastic lens breaks up the light, and then how chemicals on the film react to the exposure. Flare on the other hand manipulates pixels through spatial and color adjustments, that simulate the effects, but not the cause. Therefore, it can never be 100% perfect. Having said that, let's open up Flare and try to create the best possible Flare Holga simulation.

First we need to examine what the typical characteristics of a Holga shot are. Through looking at lots and lots of Holga photos I came up with the following:

1) Vignetting, the strong dark corners, as seen here.

Vignetting is easy to add: Just select it from the Lens effects. Initially the Blending mode is set to Multiply, this will simply darken the corners. This is usually fine, but if you do have strong light sources in the corners of your photo these will be darkened, too, which will look wrong. In this case use Overlay blending. As a result of Overlay blending the center will lighten up, so use the Exposure effect to decrease the exposure and compensate for this effect. Also, set the roundness slider to the right, which will result in a completely circular vignette. Since lenses are perfectly round, this is the vignetting they create.

2) Pincushion distortion, a geometrical distotion, as seen here.

To simulate Pincushion distortion you need to combine two effects: First add Barrel Distortion from the Special effects and move the Intensity to the left. Also, to make the effect more dramatic, as with the Holga it definitely is, move the Radius slider completely to the right. The created distortion is fine, but as a side effect you have a pillow-shaped border around your photo now. To get rid of this use the Scaling effect from the Special effects. Scale the image up until all of the border is gone. Note that its better to have a bit more Scaling than neccessary, because if you want to save this as a Preset it should work on wider aspect ratios, too. The wider the photo, the more scaling you will need.

3) Edge blur, caused by distortion and plastic lens, as seen here.

If you applied the Pincussion distortion and scale, you will see blur in the edges already. The plastic lens of the Holga is really bad though, so in this case we need to add additional blur. Add Gaussian Blur from the Lens effects and set the Blending Mask to either Vignette or Strong Vignette, depending on how strong you want the effect. Use the Radius slider to adjust the blur.

4) Ghosting, and a slight glow, as seen here.

The ghosting and the glow are very subtle effects of the Holga caused by the cheap plastic lens. Start by adding the Glow effect from the Lens effects, and adjust Radius, Intensity, but also the Opacity to blend the original and the glow to create an ethereal look.

Next thing is Ghosting: This means there is the same image just a slightly bit bigger overlayed over the original. This happens by how the plastic lens breaks the different wavelength of light, and is called chromatic aberration. We can simultate that by adding a Scaling effect from the Special effects, and setting the Opacity to 50%, which will show both images in the same amount. Move the Scaling slider to change the offset. To make this look original, the scaling should be very small.

Since this applies the scale to the complete light spectrum, it looks more original when the photo is converted to black & white. Interestingly, that is also why real Holga shots usually look better in black & white: The chromatic abberation of the Holga is really very strong. To convert to grayscale add the Black & White effect from the Color effects.

Finally this could be finished with a Zoom Blur from the Lens effects. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is too much. Since Flare allows us to go in and change parameters easily, this can be decided depending on the photo.

5) Finishing touches: Lightleaks, grain, square crop, emulsion layers, etc.

Holgas are sometimes not completely sealed, creating spots and streaks from light coming in from the case. Add the Lightleak effect from the Special effects and select a lightleak you like. If you converted to Black & White, move the Lightleak behind the Black & White effect, since a color lightleak on a black & white film is physically impossible. Every effect has a handle (the three horizontal lines on top of the effect view), use it to move the effect up or down.

To simulate the properties of film further, you could add the Grain effect from the Special effects. Another touch would be to add emulsion streaks. These could be the result of shooting expired film in your Holga. Add the Texture effect from the Special effects, choose one of the Emulsion Layer textures, and reduce the Opacity to a minimum. This should be barely visible.

Oh, and don't forget to crop your image to Square, since this is the format the Holga shoots. Some people modify their Holgas to take 35mm film, in this case crop to 2:3 and add the Film Strip Negative texture. Since the 35mm film strip is too narrow for the Holga, it will be exposed up to the corners, and this is exactly what this texture will show.

So, how does it look like? Here is a photograph of the Reichstag (the german parliament) I took on Saturday. This shot has been taken millions of times already, so pepping it up with a little bit of a Holga look helps, I hope. :-)

BTW. You can find these steps completely ready and fine-tuned in the default preset called "Molga". Feel free to see this as a starting point, and edit away: This is what Flare was designed for. Start with a preset and then adjust to make it perfectly fit your photo.

Wolfgang Ante

A Better Effects App

After more than a year in the making Flare is finally available in the Mac App Store. This post explains why Flare was first created and the idea that spawned it.

I was always fascinated by the possibilities of post-processing. The ability to embellish your photo after it has been shot is something great: It's another creative process after the initial creative process of framing and composing your shot. Post-processing can make your photos stand out and can also be great fun.

Or rather, it should be. Until now the tools available have been either very complicated, like full-fledged image editors that overwhelm users with complex functionality, or very simple with all-or-nothing effects that don't allow much creativity. As a photographer, I was personally very frustrated with post-processing. On sites like flickr I found lots of people like me that care deeply about their photography but have abandoned post-processing completely because it is simply not as much fun as shooting.

When you are a photo enthusiast it's all about the fun you have, but when post-processing is either too complex or too limited then people tend to skip it all together.

This insight led to the initial design of Flare. The concept was to create a simple piece of software that still allows users to go in and edit quickly and easily. Ready-made effects (in Flare they are called Presets) are a great start. Throw in a photo and choose the one effect that fits the photo best. Unfortunately, this is where simple effect apps have traditionally stopped. But in Flare's case this is just the beginning: Clicking on the edit tab, users are able to see (and edit!) the magic -- the building blocks that make up all the various effects. This is where creativity starts. In the beginning users will just adjust settings to learn what does what. This is intuitive and already fun, because every change is reflected in real-time on the photo. But soon they'll start to re-arrange and add new simple blocks, creating all-new presets. At this point, post-processing has become a creative process, just like shooting. And just as much fun.

This is what Flare is all about. If you love photography, but are frustrated with post-processing, download Flare now and give it another try.

Wolfgang Ante

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