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Post-Processing With Snapseed
Kamera Express
Snapseed: the versatile mobile photo editor
“I suddenly realized that I hadn’t used Photoshop for weeks. I was doing everything in Snapseed,” a photographer once reportedly said. Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but the statement perfectly captures the power and versatility of this free photo editing app for smartphones and tablets.
Snapseed is owned by Google, but was originally developed at the beginning of this century by Nik Software, a company associated with Nikon. The app is available for both iOS and Android and is ideal for smartphone photography.
With Snapseed, you can adjust virtually every aspect of your photos. Not only standard edits such as contrast, saturation, and brightness, but also rotating, straightening, cropping, and sharpening are possible — all with your fingertips.
Even local adjustments are supported, thanks to Snapseed’s adjustment brush. You can also instantly compare your image before and after editing, and every step can easily be undone.
Compact camera
Very useful, because working with Snapseed can be addictive: you keep editing, and before you know it, your photo is completely unrecognizable. Fortunately, any unnecessary adjustment can easily be undone.
Of course, the app also includes ready-made filters. Black and white is one of the simplest options, but there are also filters such as Glamour Glow, which gives portrait photos a classic glamour look. Another example is Tonal Contrast, which allows you to “protect” shadows and highlights by making them darker or lighter respectively. This helps preserve details in both the bright and dark areas of your photo after editing.
One important note: the image information must already be present in the original file. Snapseed cannot turn a completely white sky into a blue one.
Compact camera
What makes Snapseed especially great is that the strength of every filter can be adjusted. Take Grunge, for example: it’s quite a heavy effect that gives photos a rough, gritty look. But if you feel the effect is a bit too intense, you can easily reduce its strength. This allows you to create a photo with just a subtle edgy feel — not too extreme, but enough to make it stand out from the original image you captured on your phone.
One of Snapseed’s strongest features is the ability to make local adjustments. By tapping the “Selective” tool, you can adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and structure in specific areas of the image. And not just in one spot — you can make adjustments in seven or eight different places if needed.
Another very useful feature: Snapseed remembers your last editing workflow. So if you’ve taken a series of photos of the same subject and want them all to have the same look, it’s very easy to apply consistent edits. You still need to process them one by one, but that’s much faster than repeating every adjustment from scratch for each image.
Compact camera
In the latest major content update for Snapseed, a very useful feature was added: Tutorials. The first one, Getting Started, is designed for anyone new to Snapseed and helps you find your way around the app.
After that, the tutorials cover some of the app’s most impressive editing techniques, with results that go far beyond the standard filters found in your smartphone’s default photo app or on Instagram.
Even if you’ve been using Snapseed for a while, the Tutorials section is definitely worth exploring. Not only does it teach you new techniques, but it also includes useful tricks from photographers for overcoming the limitations of certain standard editing tools. For example, if you want to apply blur around a subject that isn’t perfectly oval or round.
