Enter the Afterlight: Photo Editing App

One of my favorite apps on both iOS ($0.99) and Android ($0.99) is Afterlight.

Afterlight can be powerful or it can be very simple. You can make simple adjustments to creating a batch process and ultimately creating your very own preset. There are few apps out there that do this and the ones that do may not have as great as an output as Afterlight. It's definitely something I have in my mobile camera bag. I absolutely love having my own presets for my photos. It suits the style of photos that I take and as you will see in this really quick and simple tutorial, its also for photos that I don't usually take.

This batch feature is called "Fusion" in Afterlight. Basically its similar to the Photoshop action where you create a set of actions that you could use for batch images or similar images.

The Fusion that I created for the purpose of this tutorial is "Sustenance." I rarely take food photos but just so happened to run into a great breakfast restaurant and had my new device handy, the HTC One A9.

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Enter Afterlight

Open up Afterlight and as you can see it opens up with your most recent photos. You can also take a new photo or open up an image from you camera roll.

You can also see the great images made by Afterlight by hitting the Instagram icon. Right next to that is the Settings button. This includes options to start in Camera Mode, save your EXIF and location, use your full resolution, access low light boost, auto save to your camera roll, and choose the background color during editing.

For this first step, choose an image.

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Choose a Preset

Once you have chosen a photo, it will bring you to a preview. Here you can choose the image and it'll open up to the editor.

Below you will find (in this order from left to right) Revert, Adjustments, Filters, Dusts and Grains, Crops and Straighten, and Double Exposure.

For this step choose Filters>Fusion>Hit the +.

Choose a Filter and make your adjustments as needed. For this image I increased my Clarity and Contrast and decreased my Exposure a bit. I also increased the Saturation to give a bit more color.

Note: I made these adjustments to try and have the image match what it looked like what I saw and not what the camera saw. Any toning I did was for shear artistic (Fade, Crop) purposes.

All of these actions will be recorded in a box in the lower right hand. Once you are finished you can see the amount of actions that you have taken.

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Name and Save

Once you are happy with the image, you can compare the image with its original by pressing the your image. It will give you both the original and the draft of your work.

After that, hit the "Done" button in the upper right hand corner. This will prompt you to name your "Fusion."

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Save and Share

After your "Fusion" has been saved you can then choose from the following options:

Size of the images
Save to your Camera Roll
Share to Social Media

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Voila

I hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial for Afterlight. Again I think that there are many apps out there that have many of the same features. Afterlight offers one of the better batch options for mobile photographers.

I love the idea of saving my own presets and I have many of them. I hope that you get to create many as well.