iphoggy-bloggy

Pixel-safe removal of unwanted space with Image Blender

It was brilliant to meet up with some of my iphoneography class students last night. “It changed my life” said one. But enough of the self-bigging-up. We talked about an intriguing photo by @italianbrother and he explained how he had used an app we covered in the class, Liquid Scale, to remove some of the space between the two figures in order to fit it into a square frame. I’d been using it quite a lot too - until I discovered that you lose a lot of pixels with the resulting image.

But there’s a workaround that allows you to remove that unwanted space without losing any resolution. Take this picture of the escalators at Wembley stadium that I took recently as an example:

Nice photo, but to use up all the space in the Instagram square, I thought I could get rid of the horizontal section in the middle, which wasn’t really adding anything to the image. So using Image Blender I put two copies of the same image on top of each other and then, using the Arrange function (tap bottom right of the screen), I moved the top one slightly down.

Then, using the Mask function, I erased the bottom half of the top photo and then cropped out the top part in Snapseed, to give the image below. So now it’s a nice square shape that you can fit into the Instagram frame, you don’t really notice the join and you don’t lose any of those lovely pixels!