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.

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.

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.

One way to allow a longer exposure without over-exposing a photo is to use a neutral density (ND) filter. These attach onto the end of a lens and restrict the amount of light which can pass through them resulting in the shutter having to stay open for longer in order to maintain the correct exposure.  They are neutral because they shouldn’t affect the final image colour balance.

If you compared two images of the same still scene at the same time and with the same aperture; one taken with a ND filter and one without, as long as they were exposed correctly they should appear identical although the ND filtered exposure would have required the shutter to remain open for longer.

When it comes to film cameras, once light has entered the camera body you no longer have any control over how it’s recorded. Apart from varying the aperture and shutter speed (which we may want to keep at specific values), using a ND filter is the next most obvious way to control the amount of light reaching the film.

Once the light of a scene has entered a modern day digital SLR, every part of the resultant image is controlled hardware and software.  My question is why isn’t there an electronic ND filter built into my DSLR?

From my days of science class in school, I recall that digital sampling of an analgoue waveform effectively takes samples at discrete intervals.  When a photograph is being taken with a DSLR, the analogue light is digitised by the camera.  When carrying out this conversion process, why can’t it dampen down the sampled values by a specific amount i.e. effectively reduce the amount of light registered?

Maybe I’ve got physics wrong, but I’d like to know why there aren’t ND filters built into modern day DSLRs or maybe there are, but I’m just not aware of them?

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.

When I took the shots of the scenes, I wasn’t solely intending on shooting for HDR processing, but seeing just how contrasty the scenes were I decided it would be a good idea to bracket my exposures to capture the details in the shadows and highlights that would otherwise be lost in a single exposure metered for the mid-tones.

Taking HDR out of the picture (no pun intended) completely, bracketing exposures is an established technique which can help a photographer get the best exposure for the scene. With the ability to review shots immediately after they’re taken, it’s probably not used as much with digital SLRs as it was with slide film where the exposure latitude was very slim.

Bracketing my exposure gave me some additional reassurance that I was capturing the maximum amount of detail from the scene and also allowed me to have the option of producing a HDR variation.

If you like, HDR, was an afterthought. Okay, it wasn’t, but it could well have been.

So, the HDR composites haven’t replaced the single exposure versions. I just wanted to have them in addition to them and also try my hand at HDR for the first time. Sure, I could turn a blind eye to HDR and go on about how it’s not proper photography, but I’d like to think I’m a bit more open-minded than that. You don’t know what you’re missing until you’ve tried it. Right?

I wonder if because HDR is fairly new to the world of popular digital photography people are more likely to question its use as opposed to questioning decisions made about other, more established types of processing? After all, you don’t see many people questioning the use of a digital camera nowadays do you?

It would be interesting to see whether or not, in the future, a more typical response to a photo will be

Why didn’t you use HDR?

Although, by then, our cameras may be able to capture the entire dynamic range of a contrasty scene and images that contain as much shadow and highlight detail as our eyes can detect become commonplace.

I’m looking forward to that day!

Here are a few links to HDR software, if you’d like to have a go for yourself.

HDR Software

• Photomatix
• Dynamic Photo HDR
• easyHDR
• SilverFast HDR Studio

At right this very moment, your data is at risk from any number of different ways of being destroyed, lost or overwritten. In an ideal world, computer hardware would never fail, laptops would never get knocked onto the floor and burglaries would never happen in your neighbourhood. In reality, these things can and do happen, often with serious consequences.

Fortunately, making back-up copies of your important computer files is easy and having a back-up can mean the difference between days of lost work and a few minutes of restoration time.

Whilst a simple replication operation is all that it takes to back-up your data, there are endless ways in which you can actually carry out the procedure with varying degrees of automation. From copying and pasting files to an external hard drive, to distributing encrypted copies of files burnt onto DVD at your friend’s house.

The weakest point of many back-up solutions often lies with the user. A common problem is when back-ups are carried out irregularly or are poorly organised making the restore process difficult at best.

When it comes to back-ups, automation, security and good management are all key components to an effective disaster proofing solution. In today’s Internet age, being able to maintain remote copies of files without leaving your home is fast becoming a popular option. There are currently dozens of providers of remote back-up solutions and the one I can recommend meets all of the key criteria for an effective back-up service, even going so far as to offer a free 2GB of storage space alongside paid options aimed at home and business use.

The remote back-up service I’d recommend is Mozy.

No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

In the past, I was a bit sceptical about purportedly free online file storage of any sort. I would always wonder how secure my data was, how the services were able to keep running without financing and what would happen if the company went bust.

What I found reassuring about Mozy was that it came recommended from people I trusted and also their parent company was EMC; a huge name in the corporate IT industry and beyond. They’re also responsible for Retrospect, a desktop-based back-up suite, so they’re well versed when it comes to data back-up and management.

Easy Mozy

Using Mozy for back-ups is a very straightforward affair and first of all involves installing a desktop application which controls and schedules when back-ups are performed. Just point the Mozy desktop software at the folders you wish to back-up and tell it when you want it to carry out the back-ups (either at scheduled times or whilst your computer is sitting idle). It literally is set and forget.

Your data is first encrypted on your computer before being securely transmitted to Mozy’s servers. Depending on the uploading capability of your Internet connection, backing up 1GB of data could take anything from minutes to hours.

Initial back-ups tend to take the longest because none of your files would have yet been transmitted to the secure storage location. After the initial back-up has transferred, subsequent back-ups are incremental meaning only files that have changed since the previous back-up will be transferred. This is a great way to reduce the amount of data needed to be transferred over your Internet connection and speed up the saves.

When it comes to restoring your saved data, there are several options available:

• Right-click Restore – Right-clicking on a backed-up folder on your computer gives you the option of restoring files within it.
• DVD Restore – If you’re restoring several gigabytes of data then having them onto physical media might be a better option.
• Web Restore – Backed-up files can be restored from within your Mozy account.
• Virtual Drive Restore – Browse your backed-up files as if they were on a drive insde your computer.

From a digital photographer’s point of view, Mozy’s unlimited storage MozyHome plan represents fantastic value for money as it means you can keep a complete archive of your images safe by storing remote back-up copies online. At just USD$4.95 per month, Mozy’s unlimited plan is amazingly good value for money considering you never have to worry about maintenance of the hardware your data is stored on nor about the electricity bill for making it available 24-hours a day. I’m currently signed up to a free account, but I can see me signing up for MozyHome soon.

Free 2GB Online Storage Space

If you sign up for a free 2GB account using my referral code, 6V4QE8, we’ll both get an extra 256MB of free storage space to use.

Over the years, I’d tried various upgraded versions of ACDSee, but none ever really matched the performance of the version I already had. This was in no doubt due to ACDSee becoming bloated as more and more, some would say unnecessary, features were built into it.

Whilst this meant that my primary image browser lacked modern features such as RAW support, it didn’t really matter much to me since being able to view a large number of images very quickly was much more important especially since I wasn’t shooting in RAW.

Fast forward to almost the present day and I’m shooting almost exclusively in RAW when using my EOS 40D and having to import my photo’s into Lightroom before I’m able to view them.

Not any more…

It surprises me sometimes to find that some of the best software for my needs is actually free (e.g. Firefox web browser and FireBug) and FastStone Image Viewer fits right into that same category.

FastStone Image Viewer is a highly-polished image browser, supporting a wide variety of different formats including the CR2 RAW files output by my 40D. Not only that, but it boasts many other advanced features that make it much more than an image browser such as:

• Provides editing and image conversion functionality.
• Ability to run the software from removable media, such as USB flash drives, meaning installation-free operation.
• Cataloguing, red-eye removal, slideshow, EXIF browser.
• Innovative navigation with pop-up panels in full screen mode.
• Supports all major graphics formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG.
• And much, much more.

It really is amazing that this fantastic piece of software is absolutely free for personal and educational use. That means adware and spyware free too. Donations are accepted and I very happily gave the suggested $15 amount for what is a staggering useful image tool.

Even if you already have an image viewer, I’d recommend trying FastStone Image Viewer because you might just love it!

• autofocus to take the work out of making sure your subject looks sharp,
• the digital imaging sensor which provided a non-permanent method of recording images as an alternative to burn-once silver halide film,
• the RAW image file format that allowed much tweaking of a photograph’s exposure and colour balance after it’s been taken.

Now get ready for what is likely to be the next evolutionary stage in photography…

Refocussing after a photograph has been taken!

Imagine never having another out-of-focus photograph or being able to refocus an image onto another point at any time after the shot was actually taken.

Refocus Imaging are developing a method of capturing an entire light field entering a lens and then applying computational photography to focus the image using software.

See for yourself, the results are amazing!