Snapseed Settings
Kristeen Cheek
Just for fun, I created a "Look" in the Snapseed mobile photo editing app. It's really easy to use and let's me get a one tap edit, with the ability to adjust any of the individual settings before exporting.
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Temperature is also useful for correcting warm or cool color casts. In the photo below, the snow appears blue. To fix this, increase the Temperature to warm up the colors and make the snow appear white.
In most cases, Structure produces better results. The Sharpening tool often reduces the quality of your image by introducing grain. If you do use Sharpening, use it in moderation.
Use the Trash icon to delete that edit from your photo. Tap the Sliders icon to modify the edit. This opens up the editing tool where you can change the settings you originally applied.
When adjusting perspective, be aware of the black areas that appear around the edges. Snapseed will automatically fill in these empty space. It uses pixels from the surrounding area to fill in the gaps.
A minus value darkens the image, while a plus value brightens it. Use your finger to brush over the areas you want to adjust. In the example above, +5 was used to brighten the rocks in the foreground.
If you made a mistake, you can erase your edits. Tap the up or down arrows until the value is set to Eraser. Then brush over the red areas to remove your edits. Switch off the Eye icon to hide the red highlight.
In the Snapseed Tools, tap Selective. Tap on the area of color you want to adjust. This adds an adjustment point (small circle) to your image. In the example below, the adjustment point is on the orange roof tiles.
Brush over the area that you want in black and white. In this case, we want everything to be black and white, except for the girl. Zoom in to ensure you make an accurate selection around the edges of your subject.
Swipe up or down to open the vignette tools: Outer Brightness and Inner Brightness. These let you control the brightness of the areas inside and outside the vignette area.
By default, Outer Brightness is set to -50. A minus number darkens the image, while a plus number brightens it. To adjust brightness, swipe left or right. The brightness value appears at the top of the screen.
Tap on the different colored gradients beneath your image to try out the range of vintage filters. To customize the filter, swipe up or down, then select a tool from the menu. Swipe left or right to adjust the setting.
All of the filters work in a similar way. Select the filter you want to use, then swipe up or down to access the customizable settings. Use the icons at the bottom of the screen to access more filter options.
Creating your own Looks is also a great way to come up with new ideas for editing your photos. You can quickly apply them to new images to see which edit looks best. This is an easy way to test out different edits that you might not have thought of otherwise.
The best option is to Save A Copy. Your original unedited image will remain in the Photos app. And the edited version is saved with non-destructive edits. These edits can be removed or modified at any point in the future.
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.
Snapseed is a convenient, free raster graphic editing app for enhancing photos on mobile devices in a few steps. If you are a complete beginner, follow these Snapseed editing tips to master this app more quickly.
Before learning how to use advanced techniques, you need to master the basic features of this free photo editing app. The key advantage of Snapseed is that it supports manual editing. To embellish most images, you just need to improve them a bit by adjusting their brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows and highlights.
You can use two tools for adjusting the white balance. With the Temperature tool, you can make colors in a photo colder by adding a blue tint or make it warmer by adding an orange tint. By using the Tint tool, you can add a green or pink tint to a photo.
To crop the edges of a photo, use the Crop tool. This way, you can delete distracting elements or empty space in your frame. By cropping an image, you can also improve its composition and emphasize the details.
The Rotate tool in Snapseed allows you to quickly straighten your image. Find the Rotate option in the menu and tap on it. This professional Photoshop app for your smartphone will analyze your image and straighten it automatically to fix any issues with the horizon.
Snapseed comes with a powerful Healing Tool that allows users to get rid of unnecessary objects in the frame. If there are several distracting elements in your photo, such as stones or pieces of wrapping paper lying all around, you can easily delete them. Besides, to enhance a photo of a picturesque landscape, you can even remove the figures of people in the background.
Now, you can move the second photo, resize it, adjust its opacity and change other settings until it meets your requirements. Snapseed also allows you to use several templates for making your image brighter, darker, or simply overlaying two images.
You can make the background more blurry or turn your portrait photo into a bokeh photography by using these Snapseed editing tips. With the Lens Blur option, you can shift the focus and blur the surrounding area.
If you have a flat image with bleak colors, try using the Drama tool to make it more attention-grabbing. It allows you to enhance the whole image by raising contrast and making colors more saturated.
Snapseed has in-built text fields and frames that you can use for adding text to your images. This option comes in handy when you need to create a watermark to protect your images from being copied or if you want to add a frame to your photo.
This convenient app for photographers allows you to save an output image in the highest quality possible. Snapseed saves all the edited images as JPG files with a compression rate of 95% by default. However, you can raise this rate to 100% in the Settings menu.
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