The Toolbox: Focal Photo Effects

We last talked about Vintage Photo Effects, and how they’re your friend. They’re fairly easy to use, you’ve probably used them before, and they’re just very simple in general. Today, we’re going to talk about focal area effects, they’re a bit more tricky than vintage photo effects, but they are just as useful!

The focal effects are effects that can be localized to create more interest in a particular part of your image. So what happens is iPiccy creates a ring where your photo looks just as it did before the effect, but outside the ring it applies the effect. It can either make it blurry, unfocused, pixelated, or various other options.

How To Use Focal Photo Effects

To use focal effects, you simply have to go to the second tab of iPiccy at the top and then scroll down to where the effects say “Area”. You can apply any of these effects and move your in focus ring anywhere you like! Afterwards, you can adjust it as necessary with our various sliders. I would recommend viewing these pictures in their largest resolution to see the effects more clearly.

So let’s look at one photo and then apply the focal effects afterwards. Here is our original:

The Focal Soften Effect is simpler version of the Smart Blur effect. It blurs part of your photo and keeps part in focus.

The Fancy Focus Effect will create a circle where everything inside the circle is in focus and in full color.

The Focal Zoom Effect creates a radius where things are in focus (you can move this radius where ever you want). And everything outside the radius is blurred and stretched to appear zoomed out.

The Focal B&W Effect makes most of your photo black and white and leaves a circular radius in color.

The Focal Pixelate Effect will create a radius that will make things in the center of that circle more in focus. The rest will have the pixelate effect applied which makes your photo appear to have lower resolution.

When To Use Focal Photo Effects

You use focal photo effects when you want to be able to control the part of the photo that catches the eye. By moving the focus ring around you essentially make that the target point of the photo for eyes. These are not effects that are too commonly used, but can be very effective if used properly.