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Snapseed for iPad Review
What Is Snapseed?
Snapseed is a photo editing app for the iPad, offering a variety of filters and adjustments for you to apply to images. You may be wondering whether there’s actually any room in the market for yet another image editing app especially when you’ve already got the likes of Adobe’s Photoshop Express which is available for free and the inherent boundaries put in place by the capabilities of iPad platform itself, but judging by app sales there’s obviously a good demand for image editing on the iPad and the portability of the iPad means you’re more likely to have it with you as opposed to a more restrictive laptop or desktop.
The main menu screen with the original image
Features
Similar to other photo editing apps, Snapseed offers a number of ‘filters’ which allow you to change brightness, contrast, etc. as well as apply a number of creative effects such as black and white conversions, adding borders, and vintage film effects. Where Snapseed stands out from the crowd is in its offering of localised adjustments (via the Selective Adjust filter). Apps offering adjustments which affect the entire image are common, but Snapseed offers a finer level of control with its U Point technology which allows you to restrict an adjustment to specific areas of an image based upon shape or colour criteria. If you’ve used Adobe Lightroom (v2 onwards) then you might be familiar with auto masking when applying selective local adjustments. U Point does a similar type of thing and makes it possible to apply specific adjustments (currently just brightness, saturation and contrast) to the sky of a landscape or the skin of a portrait without affecting anything else around it.
Selective Adjust with Nik's U Point technology in action.
Selective Adjust with multiple control points.
This localised editing takes Snapseed a big step towards a truly comprehensive, tablet based photo editing solution and opens up a lot of avenues which were previously closed.
Aside from selective adjustments, Snapseed offers 10 additional filters:
- Auto Correct – Colour and exposure are adjusted automatically with manual fine tuning available.
- Tune Image – Adjust White Balance, Saturation, Contrast, Brightness, and ‘Ambience’.
- Straighten & Rotate – A grid is overlaid to assist accurate levelling.
- Crop – Grab the corners (to maintain aspect ratio) or edges of a photo to quickly crop down an image.
- Black & White – A selection of conversion styles is offered along with manual adjustment of brightness, contrast and grain.
- Vintage – Attempts to replicate the lomo look with various expired film styles, paper textures and vignetting.
- Drama – A selection of effects which, as the name suggests, helps to make your images more dramatic looking!
- Grunge – A huge variety of effects which aim to add some ‘grittiness’ to your images.
- Center Focus – Adds variable blurring around a user defined point within the image.
- Organic Frames – Puts a styled border around your image.
In Use
Using Snapseed is a pleasure and the built-in help overlays are very effective for quickly getting to grips with how to make use of the various functions. Nik Software also provide tutorials and guidance via their website. The layout of controls is logical and consistent. The use of the iPad touch screen means resizing can be done with pinch gestures and swiping is used to choose between in-filter adjustments such as brightness and contrast and also to control the degree to which they’re applied. Both portrait and landscape orientation is supported. So, you can hold your iPad according to the orientation of your image to make full use of available screen real estate.
Swiping vertically selects between adjustments, horizontally varies the strength of those adjustments.
On the original iPad, performance is very good. Some effects do take a second or two to render, but most operations feel satisfyingly lag-free. Extrapolate this performance onto the iPad2 and I’d expect a very snappy performance.
There’s a very handy compare button which when held down shows you the image before the current filter or shows you the original image depending on whether you press the one from within a filter screen or from within the main menu screen.
It’s worth noting that original image files are left untouched. Any edits made using Snapseed must be exported as distinct image files.
Who Might Use Snapseed?
Despite the plethora of effects and levels of tweaking which can be applied, I find it difficult to suggest it’s the answer to a professional photographer’s search for an iPad based Lightroom, Photoshop or Aperture. It’s not possible to batch process and no way to define your own presets which means processing every image from scratch. Also, there’s very limited control of colours. So, sending off a processed image for printing is taking a gamble on whether or not the colours would be accurately reproduced. Whether or not an iPad’s display screen is suitable for precise colour work is outside of the scope of this review.
Snapseed makes it very easy to apply a large variety of creative effects as well as carry out a number of standard adjustments. For the social photographer wanting to process a handful of images at a time for sharing via email, Flickr or Facebook it’s excellent as there’s support built right into the app. Printing via Apple AirPrint™ is also supported.
How Snapseed Could Be Improved
At the time of writing, Snapseed could well be argued as the best image editing app for iOS mainly due to its ability to apply localised adjustments, good feature set and ease of use, but there’s definitely room for improvement. Not to mention, there’s a gaping hole where I feel some essential functionality has been left out such as:
- Sharpening – localised and image-wide
- Resizing/Rescaling
- Red-eye correction
- Magnified view for finer edits
- Pre-defined crop ratios
As a workaround, other image editing apps can be used to take up the slack, but it would be more convenient to have everything available in a single app without the need to export/import images.
Additional functionality which would be nice to see:
- Cloning & healing
- Histogram
- Colour correction
- Curves adjustment – localised and image-wide
- Export in non-lossy file formats
- Watermarking
- Batch processing
- User defined presets
- Layers
Whilst additional features might increase development costs and push Snapseed into a different target market, there’s nothing to prevent Nik Software releasing a ‘pro’ version to better cater for the professional or more demanding photographer. At £2.99, the app is good value for money and I would be happy to pay the same amount again for the above additional functionality.
Conclusion
Overall, Snapseed is an excellent image editing app for the iPad and sets a new standard by which future apps can be compared against.
It’s a promising sign that development of image editing apps on the iPad (and perhaps other mobile platforms) hasn’t plateaued, but is progressing towards satisfying the demands of those who want to have more control over their image editing. Nik Software have demonstrated this quite clearly with Snapseed which I feel is an evolutionary step forward in iPad based image editing.
The original, unedited photograph
The finished photograph.
24/06/2011 Update
Version 1.1.0 has been released to the iTunes app store. The main benefits include supports for RAW images transferred with the Camera Connector kit and the preservation of EXIF data upon saving.
Footnotes
The photo I edited in the screenshots was shot on a Panasonic Lumix GF1 and imported onto my iPad using the camera connection kit.
Snapseed can be downloaded from the iTunes app store.
Also posted in iPad, Review
Tagged app, editor, image, iPad, Nik Software, photo, review, Snapseed, U Point technology
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Free iStopMotion for Mac
Things have been a bit quiet here recently primarily because I’ve been focused on some major IT projects. It’s a shame because there were some really nice autumnal days in the past few months and now some really nice winter landscapes. Just wish I wasn’t ill with some sort of viral infection and able to enjoy it!
Anyway, I’ve got 3 free licences for Boinx Software’s iStopMotion Home for Mac to giveaway. It’s a useful application for creating stop motion animations and also for creating timelapse videos.
The first three people to drop a (non-spammy) comment here can have a licence each. Just make sure to include your email address so I know where to send it to. The licences have to go this week. So, I may offer them elsewhere too.
Also posted in Blog
Tagged Boinx Software, hiveaway, iStopMotion Home, Mac, Software, stop motion, time lapse
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From Windows to Mac: One Photographer’s Transition
I’ve always had an interest in the technical side of PC’s; from building custom systems to trying out new software just for fun. As time’s gone on and modern day life became more demanding, my hobbyist approach to computers had to shift onto the sidelines somewhat as I became more user than tinkerer.
As far as operating systems went, Windows was what I knew best and what I’d stuck with for many years. Sure, I’d had experience of other operating systems such as Linux, but Windows was what I used to work and play for the majority of the time.
Nowadays, my thirst for more productive time is at an all time high. As a photographer processing lots of relatively large files, having a computer platform that performs and is stable is a high priority. Unfortunately, my main Windows computer had become more and more unreliable as time went on. Having received many glowing first-hand reports on the latest generation of Macs and also from my own experience at Apple stores, I decided it was time leave the annoyances of Windows behind.
That brings me to today. I’ve left behind a large, noisy PC tower to a shiny, quiet, compact MacBook Pro. Not only has the transition been quick, but it’s been easy too. For almost every application I used on Windows, I’ve been able to replace with a Mac equivalent. For the few applications that are currently (Mac versions are under development) Windows only, I’ve still got the option of running them from within a virtual Windows installation running within the Mac OS.
The operating system is friendly and just lets me get on doing what I want to do rather than having to mess about with too many settings and having to install drivers. This means that I don’t need to put on my technical hat to and I don’t feel the need to swear at the computer because a window or dialogue from another application has just rudely popped in front of the one I was using and intercepted the keystrokes I’d just made.
All of my peripherals, bar my ancient scanner which required a driver download, worked when I plugged them in. Connecting to wireless networks has been completely painless. Photoshop, Lightroom and Photomatix are all running faster than I ever had them on Windows. Even the memory issues that plagued Lightroom for Windows seem to have been left behind. The integration between these three mainstay applications also seems to be tighter on a Mac. Images can be exported from Lightroom to be automatically fed into Photomatix and back again. No need to go digging in Explorer!
As I still have the monitor I used with my PC, I simply plug this into my MacBook Pro (requires an adapter) and I get a very useful second display which can be used to extend the desktop or can serve its own purpose e.g. to provide an alternative view of images in Lightroom.
Then of course, the software that allows me to connect my Canon 5D to a computer also comes in a Mac flavour although I’m one who prefers to transfer images directly from the memory card using a USB card reader.
The downsides of migrating to Mac? There’s obviously the cost of such a migration to consider. Apple Macs aren’t cheap and then there’s the added cost of software to consider although some developers will allow you to transfer licenses for such a transition. The user interface is different from Windows although there are elements to it which are similar. You can still browse through the file system, you still have windows which you can maximise, minimise and close, etc. Some applications have a slightly different layout on Mac from what they have on Windows. The menu layout in Firefox being an example, but it’s not something that takes very long to get used to.
As I mentioned earlier, there were a few applications which I simply couldn’t find Mac-compatible alternatives which were as good. For these, I had to turn to a virtual installation of Windows XP using VMWare’s Fusion. It’s worth noting that installing Windows XP via Fusion was easier than installing it on a real computer because Fusion handles all of the driver side of things and even sets up the network connection for you.
The most technical issue I came across was to do with the fact that Mac OS X can’t natively write to NTFS formatted drives which caused a slight headache as that’s how I’d formatted my external hard drives. Fortunately, a solution was just a quick Google away in the form of MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.
As an experienced, computer literate user, my migration from Windows to Mac has been smooth and uneventful. From the perspective of user-friendliness and stability, Mac OS X has been very good at keeping the gears and levers out of the way of my productivity. For others who are less confident with computers, I think the move to Mac is still a good one as the benefits on offer after the move has been completed are very worthwhile.
As I’ve seen and heard from many Mac users, Macs just work. I’m certainly not going to argue with them.
In-Camera Neutral Density Filter
As a photographer, there are certain times when you might want to use a relatively slow shutter speed in order to increase exposure time. An example of such an occasion is when photographing a scene containing moving water and you want the movement of the water to be captured as a milky mist for dramatic effect.
Also posted in Blog, Equipment, Technique
Tagged digital sampling, Neutral Density Filter
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Why Didn’t You Use HDR?
An interesting question recently came up in a forum regarding one of my HDR composite Buttermere landscape images,
Why choose HDR?
High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging techniques aren’t new. They’ve actually been around since the 1930s, but have only really become accessible in mainstream digital photography relatively recently with the release of HDR software aimed at the amateur and professional market.
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