Digitally Edit Photos on an Ipod

If you have read any of my previous articles on utilizing Ipod apps for education in your classroom, such as creating animations with Animation creator, or perhaps an alternative to making sculptures with Sculptmaster 3D, or perhaps you just want to use some Smart Phone apps in your classroom - but now I would like to share with you an alternative means to editing photos, which used to take my students about five days creating one picture utilizing open source programs like Gimp, they can now do in five minutes with several pictures.

I normally utilize Gimp in order to create collages with the students, or something as simple as creating a small digital effect on a photo or even swap their own face onto another photograph. But through my exploration of Apple's App Store, I found some great free apps under their productivity and photography categories. Comic Touch Lite was an app that a co-worker of mine suggested, where students could add an effect or two, but more importantly, add captions.

This project also came hand in hand with time for me to do my propaganda unit with my students. We normally start it off by having them analyze commercials and tell me which predominant type of propaganda that was used. In the past, I have done propaganda utilizing the free program of Microsoft's Photostory. With Photostory, the students would download their images, slightly edit them and then type a title on it so that it was super imposed over the image. But with Comic Touch Lite, the students have a variety of comic book styled speech bubbles and captions that they could insert over their photographs to further persuade their message of propaganda.

Unfortunately, the only real editing or special effect tool in Comic Touch Lite is the "Bulge" feature, which distorts one part of an image so that it is bubbled up. The full version of Comic Touch (currently going for $2.99) has four more special effects, but my students still found the Liter version as quite entertaining. When the students are done with their image, it can be saved to the Saved Images folder within their Ipod for further use, or you can easily email the image from within the app itself. We have also discovered once we used these pictures more n the future, each edited image now has the watermark, "Made with Comic Touch" in the lower right hand corner. SO, in a nutshell, if I had to use this app again, I would like to utilize photographs of the students, so that they can edit them into a comic book of their selves.

The other app that I wanted to discuss in this article would be Fluid FX. This app is currently going for ninety-nine cents, but if you keep an eye out, you might be able to get it for free. I find this to be a great app just for its variety of special effects that you can do. First off, it has an Autopilot feature, which basically turns your Ipad into a digital picture frame, as the app sorts and shuffles through all of your saved Ipad pictures and it will create a random effect on each one. The app also has a "video camera" feature which will record whatever it is that you are doing on your screen and then save it for further usage (could be a great use of a future teacher demo or for a student to animate a sequence of effects that they are doing to a photograph.)

The app also gives you two choices to sort through your saved photos and add effects. Within the top bar of my screen are two sets of arrows that will allow me to easily advance to the next saved photo in a folder, or so that I can check out what the next special effect does. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen, I can click on the Photo Albums button which will open up to all of my saved folders on my device. Also in the bottom right hand corner of the screen is the Mixer. The Mixer appears as two spinning wheels, such as when you have to insert the date and time on the Apple device. The wheel on the left features my available pictures, and the wheel on the right shows off the numerous filter options (you can even make up your own). SO I would have to click on the effect on the wheel, trace my finger around the image and then when I get the image the way that I want, I click on the "camera" button within the app so that it takes a still image of whatever was featured on my screen. This image is now saved in my Saved Images folder for further usage.

Well folks that is about it for now. I hope you too can benefit from these apps in your classrooms when you want them to do something unique and original with photographs. One more final app that I would like to give a shout out to would be iSwapFaces. I had previously only downloaded the free version of this app, but I loved the feature of swapping faces in a photograph which just a few clicks of a button, whereas, doing this with Gimp, would take my students several days and require a lot of frustration and patience on my part. The down side of the free version is not being able to share what you create. So, I just purchased the full version, which now allows me to save a finished image, swap heads from two different photos, and easily post/share my work on Facebook or Twitter. I would definitely recommend the few dollar investment, as it is a lot of fun and I think the kids would really enjoy how easily they can cut out a picture and paste it.

References:

App store -

Comic Touch Lite

Photostory

Fluid FX

iSwapFaces.