Snapseed
Tap'n'tweak your pictures
iOS App of the Week I decided to dip back into photography apps this week, following the news that the iPhone 4 is now the second most popular source of photo uploads on Flickr – just a whisker behind Nikon’s D90 DSLR.
Snapseed: finger-friendly image manipulation
Snapseed is a brand new photo editing app – it's designed specifically for the iPad – that addresses a weakness I’ve found in many similar apps.
Like most photo editors, Snapseed allows you to quickly adjust settings such as brightness, contrast and saturation. However, most of the editing apps I’ve used in the past can only apply these settings to the entire image.
Control points define editing zones
Snapseed provides greater editing precision by allowing you to add "control points" to your photos, and to then adjust the brightness, contrast or saturation within a limited radius just around a specific point.
Next page: Pressure points
COMMENTS
Easier to use than GIMP/Photoshop
If you've ever played with Nik Software's plugins before, you'll know that they allow some very powerful effects quite easily. I've no doubt that a Photoshop/GIMP ninja could achieve similar results, but I dare you to do it as quickly and painlessly.
DPReview recently favourably reviewed this same iPad App if you're interested: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/snapseed/
re: Mwah
Okay, I'll bite.
1- as real-time as on your laptop, so that doesn't advance/disadvantage (given that you need net access, most ipads sold are wifi-only)."
That's assuming that someone has a laptop - if they've just got a desktop machine, then they can't lug it around. If they do have a laptop, they may not want to take it with them - for example, if some has a costly, well-specced 17" model that they use to earn their daily crust, there are a number of reasons why they may not want to take it on holiday with them.
No one – certainly not the reviewer of this app – is saying ‘give Photoshop, GIMP etc., the heave-ho, this is all you need.’ The beginning of the review mentioned about the popularity of the iPhone 4 being used to upload to Flickr, so I inferred that Mr Joseph was setting the kind of context of how people might use this app.
This type of app is a convenient, easy to use way of editing photos – although I’m sure you can do some impressive stuff, if someone wants to do heavy-duty editing, then they would do it on desktop/laptop. On the other hand, if someone was on holiday or backpacking and wanted to send some photos home or upload them to something like Facebook or Flickr, after a bit of tweaking, then this is going to be a good way of doing it.
Also, very importantly, touchscreens offer an interface that a conventional laptop or desktop. Some people may find being able to touch the screen to edit photos, a more pleasurable and engaging way than using a mouse or trackpad. This is something I think is very easily overlooked about tablet devices – they offer something that is not necessarily better, but different.
The point is
It can be done in realtime (Do not have to go home/elsewhere to add effects) and upload to the net.
If you do not own a computer.
If you do own a computer but are not au-fait with GIMP
If you do own a computer but do not own an Editing package like Photoshop.
Looks like a great app
Shame it won't run on my iPhone, but I guess a lot of its coolness would be lost on the smaller screen. Yet another great reason to buy an iPad, I suppose.
Incidentally, the iPhone 4 has now overtaken the D90 as the most popular camera on Flickr.
What's the point?
The point is that you can easily get great results in a really enjoyable, hands-on way, instead of having to fiddle around with stupidly complex and overpriced software on a computer.
