Tag Archives: tutorial

Slow Shutter Cam + InstaEffect FX app tutorial

Keith display photo

I currently have this as my display photo on Facebook. It is really tacky and pretentious, but people thought it was cool and had trouble reproducing the effect, so I’m making a tutorial I guess. I’ll explain the process of how I made the photo, but I would not recommend the exact same order I use, since I took the original photo sometime before I downloaded the final app used to make this photo and hadn’t originally intended for this photo to exist the way it does.

What you will need:
An Iphone 4 or newer (I used an iPhone 4S)
Slow Shutter Cam $.99
InstaEffect FX free
Instagram free

First I used Slow Shutter Cam which is one of my favourite iPhone camera apps, I fool around with this app a lot. It’s 99 cents, but totally worth it. Go download that now I guess and follow along.

Slow Shutter Settings

When you open the app it goes straight to the camera mode. I don’t know what the default settings are, but  here are the settings I settled on ages ago (I never adjust these anymore, I’m happy with them like this). To access the settings here click on the aperture logo (bottom left button) and change them to Automatic and 2 shutter speed. This means that once you click the camera/photo button (bottom centre) it will record frames for two seconds. I usually like to turn my head in photos to get some kind of moody album cover effect. I might post some other pictures like this that I’ve taken in another post later, cos there’s a lot of cool stuff you can try.  In the originally photo I was laying down looking up in my bed. I like doing that because it gives me a flat colour in the background, you can also do it against a wall or something.

adjust blur

Once you take your photos, you use the top slider to move between the start and end points and stop the slider on a position that looks cool, I also increased the exposure in the original photo to make my skin look clear and pale. Once you get the picture looking the way you want it to, click the save button on the bottom right.

I then posted the photo to Instagram. I’m not sure which effect I used but it might have been Hudson, though my favourite is Lo-fi. This step I’d suggest you do last instead.

Keith blur

Above is how it turned out. This is the photo I inserted into the next app that I used. InstaEffect FX by monkeyX crops the picture to a square for you anyway as it is meant to be used before Instagram, so just use first ok? Select your photo when the app opens and then you get to choose some effects for your photo. Press the button that says “Effects”

effects

I used the middle effect on the second row. There are several pages of effects to choose form, but they get progressively worse. Also note there are ads in this free version of the app (which is what those “quest” and “battle” buttons are. Ignore those.

 

effect being used

Here was probably a good place to stop, but I also used the “DrawFX” button and drew a blue scribble on the picture

scribble

The blue I used is the default colour, I think I used the default size as well (you can choose colours and size at the bottom, slide across to access more colours) I kinda traced the shape of my head in the original pic, in the example above I just did a scribble.

After this I would then export the photo and put it on Instagram and then maybe add another filter and then post it on Facebook as your display photo. The slow shutter effect is kind of wasted on the final product, but  it’s what I used, I’m sure other apps will let you make the picture look over exposed as well, but that app is worth getting regardless. I hope this helps.