Snapseed editing for your cell phone and tablet images

Even though we've got a couple of biggish Canons with equally big objectives, we do still go out there and shoot with our cell phone too. The image quality is actually kind of alright. As it's a bit cumbersome to start editing your cell phone images via Photoshop or Lightroom, I find Snapseed a great app to edit in. 

Snapseed is a free app which can be used for editing your pictures on your mobile and/or tablet. Snapseed was originally developed by Nik Software. Snapseed is non-destructive, so you can always step back during your editing. And you've got loads of options in Snapseed.

So it's just a question of downloading the app and you can edit to your hearts content. 

You've got the possibility to choose an image that's already on your device or you can make a new picture. And you've also got the option to edit the very last image you took. 

When you open an image you'll get a new screen: 

In Snapseed editing, there's 3 important things to remember: 

1. This is where Snapseed shows the histogram of your picture.

2. With the pencil you can start your editing.

3. Behind the three dots you can find more options. For example a step back in your editing.

Let's see what the editing options are by clicking on the pencil:

You can see that there are two parts on this screen:

1. Tools
2. Filters

It's impossible to describe all the functionalities. But let's just check out what Crop does to your image:

You can see that there are a lot of aspect ratios you can choose from. Or you can choose your own by moving the outer edges of your image inwards.  When you're done you can click on check mark.

On the main screen you can see the counter hopped to 1. This indicates that you did 1 adjustment.

Click on the pencil  again and choose one of the filters. In this case I went with Black and White. 

Here you get to choose different kind of looks. After choosing one you click on the check mark. On the main screen you'll now see that the counter shows 2.  

Clicking on the counter will show the layers (the things you did with the image)

One of the best things is that you can work on the whole picture or just work locally. 

In the picture below I did some Dodge and Burn and you can see the mask (where the effect will appear in the image). 

There really are so many options. Just download the app and play around with it.

When you are satisfied with the image don't forget to click on Save.

 

Choose one of the three options and you're done!

Here is my end result of the quick image edit in Snapseed: 

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