Print Compositing

Print Layout FX & Compositing

Print compositing is applying different effects when adding photos to a print layout. Breeze Booth for iPad has a wide range of compositing tools available ranging from transparency and blurring to filters and blend modes. This gives huge creative control over the output without the need for Photoshop.

Right click on a photo in the print layout and select Edit photo position and effects to edit the effects applied to photos in the print layout. The Photo Position and Effects dialog will be displayed:

In this Guide

• Using the Original Image
• NEW! Filename Suffix
• Crop Image
• Opacity
• Blending Modes
• Saturation, Contrast, Vibrance
• Colorize
• Filters
• Mirror
• Blur
• Motion Blur
• Multiple Effects

Original Image

The Use original unprocessed image setting allows you to use the original image taken by the camera before any processing such as green screen, AI background removal and AI special effects. This is useful if you want to show before and after images.

Filename Suffix

The Filename Suffix allows you to dynamically apply graphics to the print layout by using tokens (eg, Surveys, QR code Data, date and time etc). This is particularly useful if you have a lot of customisations options. Where previously you would need to make every combination of overlay or background image, this allows you to add elements more programatically.

This example shows how you could have a survey asking to choose a sport, and then placing a graphic based on the answer eg: a basketball, baseball, football etc

Best practise is to add generic place holder graphics, which will then get switched out based on the suffix.

Crop Image

The left and width cropping values are expressed as a percentage of the image width e.g. to crop the image to display the left half, set ‘left’ to 0 and ‘width’ to 50. Or to crop the image to display the right half, set ‘left’ to 50 and ‘width’ to 50.

The top and height cropping values work in a similar way and are expressed as a percentage of the image height.

When an image is cropped its placement in the print layout editor does not change. Instead, the areas of the image that are cropped out are made fully transparent.

Opacity

The opacity setting controls the transparency of the photo. Set this to a value between 0 (fully transparent) to 1 (fully opaque).

Blending Modes

The blend mode controls how the photo is blended with the print layout. The following blend modes are available:

• normal
• lighten
• overlay
• screen
• hard light
• soft light
• multiply
• difference
• exclusion
• color dodge
• color burn
• luminosity
• hue
• saturation
• color

Alternatively use an image editor such as Photoshop that supports levels and blend modes to see the effect of different blend modes on overlays applied to photos.

Saturation, Contrast & Vibrance

The saturation setting adjusts the strength of the colors in the photo and ranges from 0, which has no color and gives grayscale images, through 5 which gives highly saturated images.

The vibrance setting adjusts the saturation of an image while keeping pleasing skin tones.

The contrast setting adjusts the contrast with values below 1 decreasing the contrast and values above increasing it.

Set the saturation, contrast and vibrance to 1 to leave the photo unmodified.

Colorize

The colorize option provides a simple way to convert a photo into shades of a single color. Enable the colorize checkbox, then click on the … button to the right of the color swatch to change the color used to colorize the photo.

Filters

The filter dropdown list allows a color lookup table (or LUT) to be applied the the photo. Please see the section on filters for information on how to create filters.

Mirror

The mirror option simply mirrors the image by flipping it horizontally.

Blur

The blur option applies gaussian blur to the photo. Select this option then edit the blur radius to control the amount the photo is blurred.

Motion Blur

The motion blur option blurs the photo in a linear direction to give the impression of motion. Select this option and then edit the radius to control the length of the motion blur. Edit the motion blur angle to adjust the angle of the blur (the angle is in degrees).

Apply Multiple Effects

Multiple effects can be applied to a photo e.g. applying motion blur to a photo and reducing its opacity to 0.5 to make it semi-transparent.

When several photos are placed on top of one another it can be difficult to select the right one. When this happens right click on the stack of images and move the mouse over the Selected menu entry to display a submenu listing the photos under the mouse pointer when you right clicked. The list will show the photos in descending order from the front layer to the back layer. The currently selected photo will have a checkmark against it. Left click the mouse on a different photo in the list to select it.