What Is Snapseed App Used For
Karmen Mcarthun
Teachers can use Snapseed themselves to create attractive and illustrative photos for lessons or presentations. Students can also use Snapseed for their own self-expression or projects. It'd be best used in an art or photography class, but could be a helpful tool for any classroom where students will be capturing and sharing imagery for research projects or portfolios. Since the app is free and available for iOS and Android, it's easy for most students to have access to its use. If you or your students are new to photo editing, orient yourself to what all the editing options do on the support page. There's also a support forum specific to this app with plenty of people available to help.
One way teachers can kick off a collective self-education session with Snapseed is to have students spend a school day taking photos of each other, or of nature, architecture, or anything that catches their eye. Then, the next day in the classroom, have students choose a handful of photos to edit -- perhaps choosing for each photo a unique style that evokes a mood or an era. Later that week, they can then share their results with the class, walking students through the techniques they used in a presentation that includes before and after examples. Class discussion can compare how students edited photos of similar subjects.
Snapseed is a free photo-editing app by Google. It's available for Android or iOS. You can take photos in the app and edit them, or edit photos already in your camera roll, including photos in JPG and RAW formats. It includes a large number of preset filters to apply to your photos, but there are also 29 tools you can use to apply precise and fine-tuned effects, such as tune, curves, crop, brush, perspective, HDR scape, vintage, retro lux, portrait, lens blur, frames, vignette, text, and more. You can also save a combination of edits as a particular "look" that you can then easily apply in one tap to other photos.
There are built-in tutorials that quickly show you how to achieve certain looks, from vignettes to vintage postcards. Each one is very short, listing the tools that are used in the tutorial, then going through what you need to do with step-by-step visual examples.
One particularly handy aspect of Snapseed is how easy it is to undo and revise work. At any time, you can undo or change any edits made so far, allowing you to access each edit separately. Then, once you're done with your image, you can share it, open it in another app, export it (creating a copy with permanent changes), or save it, which saves the image along with its edits that you can still undo/change in the future.
Snapseed has a nice, simple design and a deep set of fun and useful features, but it's not entirely intuitive. While it'll take some time to get oriented -- including a lot of trial-and-error -- once you get a handle on things, it's clear just how much depth there is to this app and how much leeway you have when editing your images -- including a possibly best-in-class system for undoing changes and making revisions. In terms of the editing itself, there's a perfect blend of instant gratification presets and detailed, tweakable effects that make for long-term utility. The step-by-step tutorials also offer students an accessible way to focus their photo-editing education. While there's no shortage of competition in the photo-editing genre, this free app -- spanning both iOS and Android devices -- is one teachers must check out. The only other competitor that comes close is Adobe Photoshop Express.
If you use Snapseed to edit your smartphone photos, you might have noticed the 'Ambiance' slider under the 'Tune Image' settings. Ambiance? Isn't that the mood or feeling you get at a party, not a photographic term? Yes, exactly, and that's why I avoided it for quite a while. I just couldn't figure out how to apply it effectively to my photos. And Google, which owns Snapseed, was hardly helpful.The Google help page ambiance explanation reads:
The Ambiance control is a special type of contrast that controls the balance of light in a photo. It can be used to balance backlit photos or to accentuate contrasts throughout your photo. Swipe right for photos where the subject is darker than the background. Swipe left to increase the contrast of dark objects and create a slight glow around darker objects. This is especially helpful in photos that are slightly flat.
I wasn't aware that there was a 'special type of contrast' available to photographers, just the plain old difference between light and dark, so that was surprising. And it's all very well telling us to 'swipe right for photos where the subject is darker than the background,' but what effect will it have?
As with just about everything associated with photography, the best way to understand it is to use it. So that's how I've come to write this and present you with some compare-and-contrast examples where I have swept the slider both left and right on a series of photos and analysed its impact.
In order to create examples that are clear enough for illustrative purposes, all of the ambiance settings, whether positive or negative, have been exaggerated. Subtlety and demonstration aren't natural bedfellows; that's for the real thing.
Let's start with this image of some dried berries. I've adjusted the white balance to correct for a light temperature that was out by several thousand Kelvin and cropped it marginally, but that's all. It's a good base.
When I swiped the slider to the left and dropped the ambiance by 60 points, you can see that the background became darker, the red tone has diminished, and the berries have become softer looking and less defined. A negative ambiance setting has given the photo a softer, more muted look.
When I increased the ambiance, pushing it to +60 made Eva look as if she's been on a sunbed every day of her life since birth. It was awful. So I went for +30 instead. She still looks comically rosy-cheeked, but not horrifically so. Her coat is an unattractively bright shade of pink, her wellies are deeply saturated, but the grass looks good.
Decreasing the ambiance to -30 had a rather pleasing effect, though. Her skin became more milky and the darker background helped her to gain even prominance in the image. I reckon that decreasing it even further could make for an even better look.
Having tried increasing ambiance in Eva's portrait to unpleasant effect, I didn't even bother trying it with my self-portrait. Decreasing the ambiance, this time to -100, was effective, though. I'm not sure if I prefer the original (again, slightly cropped and heavily adjusted for white balance) image or the edited one, but it's a good demonstration of the tool and shows how it gives a more muted feel to your photos.
Having a swipe and swish with the ambiance slider is definitely something to be considered when you're fiddling with your smartphone photos. The general rule seems to be that left is great for portraits and go right a bit for still lifes. But every photo's different. And maybe 'ambiance' isn't such a terrible descriptor, either. One way is more lively and bouncy and the other more muted and moody. Just like the atmosphere can be at a party.
Photo editing software and apps are becoming more and more popular with amateur and hobbyist photographers. It used to be that only professional photographers had access to photo editing software, which meant that amateur photographers were stuck without the tools to fix their images. The final photo was whatever you were able to point your camera at.
Most free apps will give you great looking photos in a few clicks, but some of these apps are better than others. Snapseed is one of the photo editing tools that stand out from the crowd. It is packed with helpful editing features, and all of them are completely free.
Snapseed was initially created as an iPad app by Nik Software, a company with an excellent reputation in the photography industry for its image editing tools, plug-ins, and presets. Professional photographers have been using these tools for many years, usually as plug-ins with their professional image editing software. Google purchased Nik Software in late 2012, which included Snapseed, and then proceeded to make it available as a free download.
What used to take several hours of work in photo editors like Photoshop and Lightroom is now a one-click action that can adjust white balance, add filters, fix red-eye, crop, add lens blur, and fix skewed lines. It can even add HDR effects and adjust curves with an assigned control point on your photos. Snapseed also has mask brush and healing adjustment features, just like professional photo editing software. You can even easily create cool double-exposure images with only a few clicks. Some of its features require a little more photography knowledge, but generally speaking, Snapseed is pretty easy to use.
Snapseed works with Android and iOS and can be downloaded in the Google Play or Apple App Store for your iPhone, Android, iPad, tablet, etc. You can also download the Snapseed desktop app for PC or Mac online for free.
Snapseed has risen in the app ratings to become one of the best free photo editing apps available. Some apps offer free limited versions of their tools and invite you to purchase more advanced features once downloaded. Snapseed is completely free and does not require any additional purchases to access features. You have full access to all the tools at all times. The app is also ad free, which only adds to the user experience.
The app could benefit by adding simpler social media network sharing options, but you can always work around these by saving the image to your photo gallery and manually uploading it to whatever social network you wish to share on.
What Snapseed does is condense the most commonly used tools from Lightroom and Photoshop and makes them accessible to non-professionals in a simple-to-use app. Snapseed is like a mini version of Lightroom with all the basic tools needed for most photo edits. Lightroom comes with many available presets, but you can purchase more and easily install them within the program. Snapseed only comes with a limited number of presets, and you usually have to create your own if you want more.
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