In addition to PicTapGo's Filters, the app offers several powerful, professional-grade tools (also referred to as "adjustments") for editing your photos. The main difference between Tools and Filters is that a Filter has a default look, but Tools don't do anything unless you manipulate them in some way. Here's a brief explanation of what's available in PicTapGo
Basics
The Basics editor provides quick access to brightness, contrast, color, warmth, and tint, via a set of 5 sliders. At their neutral position (in the center), the controls make no change to the photo. Moving the slider left or right increases or decreases that property.
- Brightness uses the exact same formula as Lights On and Lights Off, but at +/- 100 strength, the effect will be stronger than the filter version.
- Contrast - at positive values, contrast increases midtone contrast with a gentle rolloff in the highlights and shadows. At lower values, the contrast adjustment compresses the tonal range of the image, making the brightest white darker, and the darkest black lighter, without altering midtone contrast (equivalent to adjusting the output sliders in the Levels tool).
- Color adds vibrance at positive values, and reduces saturation at negative values, up to and including complete desaturation of the photo, producing a grayscale result.
- Warmth uses a very similar formula to the Warm it Up and Cool it Down filters (for positive / negative values, respectively), but with a greater adjustment range.
- Tint manipulates the green channel of the image to alter the green / magenta balance in a photo (the axis perpendicular to the warmth axis in the color wheel).
Tone
The Tone editor provides controls for the image's highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. These can help extend or reduce the image's contrast and dynamic range in ways that more basic controls cannot.
The "clarity" slider in the Tone editor only has an effect if the highlights or shadows have been altered. It essentially changes the radius of those operations, and can create a different feel for the result.
AutoMask
The AutoMask tool uses artificial intelligence to allow separate adjustments to the subject and background of an image. The brightness, contrast, saturation, and warmth controls allow for the same adjustments as the Basics editor, but constrained to just that part of the image. Mask Edge changes the selection's bias between foreground and background, and can be used to make the selection more closely match the actual photo.
Intensity
The intensity tool helps increase (or decrease) the texture and sense of detail in an image by using our version of a Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization. This is just fancy way of saying that, for each area of the image, the Intensity tool tries to make sure there's a full range of lights and darks. This can help automatically balance the tones of images with a large difference in illumination between different image areas. The Softness control changes how the result is blended back with the original image, and can make the effect more dramatic or subtle.
Curves
Curves is a traditional image editing tool that lets you map input values to output values via a curve function you define with control points. It it modeled off the Photoshop curves tool and functions essentially identically.
Levels
Levels is a traditional image editing tool that manipulates the input and output white and black point of the image (with a bonus gamma correction adjustment). It is modeled off the Photoshop tool of the same name, and functions essentially identically.
Colors
Colors provides individual Hue, Saturation, and Lightness adjustments for six primary colors. It can be used to make subtle or dramatic adjustments to the colors of your image, based on the hue of the input pixel. Although the interface is different, the algorithm is essentially the same as Photoshop's Hue / Saturation adjustment. Each slider in the Colors tool visually represents how the affected colors will change.
Vignette
- Vignette allows you to lighten or darken the edges of the image.
- Amount controls how much lighter or darker the affected pixels will become.
- Size makes the affected area larger or smaller.
- Feather changes how steep the transition is between affected and fully-affected areas.
- Roundness controls the shape of the darkened areas. With roundness at 0, the shape of the vignette effect will match the shape of the photo. At roundness=100, the vignette will be circular (like the natural falloff toward the edges of a camera lens), and will have a stronger effect on one axis of the photo if the image is not square.
AutoBlur
AutoBlur, like AutoMask, uses artificial intelligence to detect the image's subject, and lets you blur the background separately.
There are three blur modes available, which each look aesthetically different, and are useful in different situations:
- Gaussian is a soft-edged blur commonly used in image editing and graphic design applications
- Lens uses an algorithm that more closely mimics the blur effect of a camera lens
- Median will generally preserve hard edges, and only blur areas where the differences between nearby pixels are small. This is useful in cleaning up the background of studio images shot against a solid color backdrop.
In addition, AutoBlur provides the following controls:
- Radius controls how much blur is applied to the background
- Mask Edge controls the transition between foreground and background
Common Additional controls
All of PicTapGo's Tools editors have some common gesture and shortcut controls.
- Double-tap the image to confirm (same as pressing ✓)
- Pull down to cancel (same as pressing ⅹ)
- Press and hold the left side of the image to view the original image (before any filters or tools in PicTapGo)
- Press and hold the right side of the image to view the previous step (before the current tool)