by Your iPhone is remarkable in many ways, but its camera will simply never capture photos with a deliciously shallow depth of field like your DSLR. And unless Apple finds a way to cram a much, much larger sensor into the phone, that will always be the case. You can simulate that luxuriant, shallow depth of field effect through software, though. Tadaa SLR does just that.
Actually, Tadaa doesn’t simply let you artificially tweak the depth of field; it lets you change the focus point of the photo. And it does that after you’ve taken the image, not unlike what you can do with the innovative Lytro camera.
You start Tadaa in camera mode; compose and take your shot. If you want to start with an existing photo, you can alternately choose one from your camera roll. There are a few widgets: Display a line of thirds grid, switch between a square or wide shot, and turn the flash on and off. Tadaa even gives you access to both the front and rear cameras.
After taking the shot, you paint a mask over whatever object you want to be in sharp focus. Tadaa has pretty smart edge detection, so you can just dab with your finger and the app selects the whole subject for you. If that’s not working—and I did run into some subjects that Tadaa refused to select in their entirety—you can turn off edge detection and do the painting manually. In general, though, the trick is to slightly overpaint your subject so that Tadaa can find the edges.
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