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Okay Lucy, when you tap the iCloud link below, it will open in the Shortcuts app. Tap the blue "Add Shortcut" button at the bottom and the shortcut will added to your shortcuts collection. Then when you share a photo, you should see "Open Snapseed" in the list of options.
By the way, when that share sheet appears, the list of actions can be edited: Scroll to the bottom and tap "Edit Actions..." You can add the shortcut to Favorites and/or reorder the list. If you have any problems, let me know. Here's the iCloud link to the shortcut:
Snapseed, developed by Google, is a popular photo editing app available for Android and iOS that gives a lot of bang for the buck, considering it's a free smartphone app. I love the software, but I wish it had some basic functions to make it my go-to editing app on mobile devices.
I've been using Snapseed for several years now and remember how pleased I was when they first brought out raw file support, because it meant I could import my DSLR images and edit them without the need to transfer photos to my computer. A few years later and my latest smartphone also now shoots raw, and it's great to edit with such flexibility. But there's still a few design hang-ups and odd idiosyncrasies that stop it from becoming the best smartphone editing app out there, at least for me.
When you first open an image in Snapseed, you'll spot three options on the bottom bar. Styles, Tools, and Export. Tools contain all the manually adjustable settings the app has to offer, and it's where I spend most of my time. Enter here, and you'll see my first bugbear of the app. The tools aren't listed alphabetically.
Stop! I can already hear you muttering at me, and yes, I know Lightroom doesn't do this either. It sounds weird to put everything in alphabetical order, because what if the tools you use most often are at the bottom of the list? I mean, that's why it's laid out like that, so the most commonly used tools are at the top, ready to go. But the thing is, they're not. How often do you add vignettes to photos? More commonly than applying a grungy filter, I bet, and yet it's all the way down the bottom of the list. Also, I've been using the app for so long that I know the names of the tools I want to apply but can't necessarily remember where they are on the screen, so I have to go hunting for them.
Okay, so alphabetizing doesn't appeal? Sure, I understand. Instead then, why not give us the option to reorder the tools? We could click and hold, then drag them into a different tile arrangement. Easy. I know it might take some time and money to program this, but hey, it's Google.
Seriously, go and have a look! We've got a vignette with inner and outer brightness controls (something that even Lightroom Classic doesn't do), a brush with exposure controls, and even the ability to edit each stack and selectively paint the scene wherever we want it, but there's no graduated filter.
I'd like to see Google take a leaf out of Adobe's book and give us the option of inverting our Selective tool (Adobe calls this the Radial tool). Instead of only affecting the inside of the circle, we could alter everything outside of it. And maybe give us the option to use the automatic mask function it uses by default. That is, if you drop the Selective tool pin on a patch of blue, it'll automatically mask your adjustments to other areas in that color/tone in the radius of your editing circle.
This one isn't as important for me, but I know it'd benefit plenty of users out there. Batch-processing in Snapseed currently consists of copying and pasting the edit stack onto each newly loaded photo or alternatively just pressing "Last edits" under the Styles tab. But loading up each new image and pasting the settings is tedious and frankly, something I thought we'd seen the last of a few years back. I can't give all the blame to Google here, because Adobe does it too. Use Lightroom CC (not Classic), and you'll have to do the same thing at the time of writing.
Although Snapseed lacks the features I've listed above, I still think it's a great editing app for smartphones. I mean, come on. I don't need a subscription, and I'm not required to make a one-off payment. It's completely free, so what's not to love? The fact that it's so robust, reliable, and does so many things well means it's still my favorite editing app on a mobile device. Yes, I have a subscription to Lightroom and have it installed on my phone, but I still only use Snapseed.
I just wish it added a few features to make things that much easier for me. Then, I'd probably seriously reconsider my subscription to Adobe. Perhaps then, it would persuade me to move towards a cheaper desktop alternative for the heavier processes, such as Affinity Photo. Who knows, maybe we'll see a legitimate desktop version of Snapseed in the future?
Despite the fact that it has color curves, it really needs an h/s/l control in the selection. Eventually a 3 wheel corrector would also be amazing. But adding that hue control in the selection tool would be an incredibly powerful and simple addition.
Reading all this.. I would say: Make it a proper desktop application to kick the bums of Adobe and others. Fiddling with images on mobile phone screens is just the wrong tool for it.Tablets might work, though.
That would be cool. You can actually install an android emulator on your desktop and run snapseed as a desktop application that way. I've done it as an experiment on a few photos - however it's still lacking features that would make it better than already available software.
I also like Snapseed as well. but the more fundamental problem with Snapseed is, Google is doing nothing about keeping it updated, refreshed, improved, up-to-date to offer some of these desired features mentijoned in the article. If Google doesn't bother to do anything for their Android app, don't ever expect them to suddenly come up with a desktop version of Snapseed, especially with Google Photo's existence. So, one either needs to be satisfied with Snapsee as it is or find alternatives.
In my opionion, the main problem of the darktable output is that the shadows are not so pleasing. It looks like the noise distribution of the grain is clipped and only the whiter part is present: something like salt particles over a black background.
I think that snapseed is giving the most pleasing grain, delivering a more natural and realistic result. GMIC is also doing a good job but I like it a little less.
The grain in an analogical photo comes from the irregular structure of the photo-sensible material deposited on the film. When the exposure is transferred to the photographic paper the noise is transferred differently for different lightness level. Approaching black and white the distribution of the noise collapse.
I think this scheme from ref. [1] is usefull for understanding the problem:
Adapted from ref. [1]. Film grain histogram is amplified by the slope of paper characteristic curve in midtone while severely compressed by the plateau of the curve in the highlight and shadow.
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Adapted from ref. [1]. The histograms of the noise in the dark regions is skewed so that the right arm of the distribution is broader than the left one. In the highlight regions the opposite.
For example having a skewed histogram in an highlight region means that there are darker spots than what expected for a symmetrical distribution. The grain appears less uniform. This helps with the organic and realistic feel. The next image hopefully should help to clarify the point. If not some trust is needed.
Here it is even more evident that snapseed is producing a smoother transition from mid-tones to black and white. Using a parallelism, it resemble a stone column illuminated on one right side with a soft light. It somewhat delivers a three dimensional feel.
GMIC is dealing better than darktable with the shadows but the highlights are still not very natural.
From this plots, it emerges that snapseed grain has a very round and symmetric trend. Confirming the preliminary impressions, GMIC output is similar to snapseed but the noise amount does not go to zero at the edges. Darktable has the most peculiar trend, surprisingly showing correlated peaks.
Now that we know the what are the possible problems of grain we can try to improve. A possible solution could be to use two instances of the grain module. One will deal mainly with the mid-tones, producing symmetrically distributed grain. The second will help with the skewing part modulating the transition towards shadows and highlights.
I think darktable grain can be improved. Exploiting the main properties of a natural and realistic grain, it is possible to get good results using two instances of the grain module.
A more elegant approach would require to work under the hood to refine how grain in produced and added to the image.
I started slightly modifing a logarithmic sigmoidal function f(x) which represents the typical shape of a response curve of photographic paper,
,
here x is the logarithm of the exposure of the photographic paper, gamma is the slope in the midtones, and delta is a small shift. The values of f(x) represent an hypothetical density impressed on the paper.
In order to add the noise we must convert the lightness channel of the photo (that I assume proportional to the density impressed on the photographic paper) in the originating log-exposure values. We can use the inverse of f(x) defined as
.
The lightness channel (L) of the photograph should be edited accordingly to the following equation
where k is a parameter to tune the amount of grain. The procedure leaves unaffected the average picture but distort and stretches the noise adapting its characteristics to the specific lightness value.
The highligths/shadows skewed distributions are more evident when watching only the grain subtracting the linear trend:
On the left of the image there are more white dots and on the right of the image there are more black dots.