As we promised last month, Here is June's App of the Month: Snapseed!
Snapseed is an amazing photo editing app brought to you by Nik Software, a company with serious following in the world of professional photography. It was first released for the iPad in June 2011 and then for the iPhone in August 2011, it won Apple's iPad App of the Year 2012 Award and now it's here as Sl's Repository's App of the Month of June.
Upon opening the app, you can select to take a picture using the camera – on both the iPhone and the iPad – or select an existing one from either your photo library, or iCloud’s Photo Stream. This makes it ideal for the iPad, as chances are many of your best photos will be taken with your iPhone, but will benefit from editing using the iPad’s bigger screen.
Your chosen picture is presented on the right of the screen, along with a list of options on the left. On the iPhone, this is altered slightly, with the picture above a scrollable list of options. The first six cover simple tasks like straighten and crop, to more complicated adjustments such as the ability to chose one particular spot and alter the contrast, brightness and saturation.
These, along with colour, white balance and ambiance can be applied to the whole image too, or you can select an automatic option to let the app sort out the contrast and colour for you.
Then there are four different filter options, Black and White, Vintage, Drama and Grunge, each of which then contains a variety of examples. It’s not just a case of slapping a filter on either, as the effect can be altered, usually in several different ways, to really tune the look to your liking.
Finally, there’s a Centre Focus and Tilt-Shift option, to help bring the focal point of your picture to the forefront. Once you’re happy with your image, you can add one of eight different frames, which as you’d expect can be tweaked too.
In previous years, all this editing would have meant drop down menus, fiddly sliders and confusing technical terms, but Snapseed avoids all of this by introducing a wonderful touch control system. We’ll use the standard Tune Image menu as an example. Here you can change the brightness, colour, contrast and various other aspects of you picture. A swipe up and down the screen lets you choose which one, and a swipe left and right changes the parameter. That’s it, there’s really nothing else to learn.
When you move on to Tilt-Shift, this left/right swipe is used in conjunction with a pinch to widen or decrease the affected area. It’s incredibly easy, plus the first time you use each setting, a series of instructions overlays the page, so there’s no hunting for hints and tips.
All this is brilliant, and you can spend hours modifying your pictures, but the feature I like the most with Snapseed is the integration with other apps. Photos edited with Snapseed can be sent for sharing or further editing to your email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and Camera . If you want to add some extra effects to the photo after you finished your Snapseed editing, you can send it to Instagram or Camera without having to save the photo, exit Snapseed, Open Instagram or Camera and then Open the saved photo there because with just a single tap, Snapseed will do all of this proccess for you and your photo will be ready to be edited in Instagram or Camera .
To sum it all up, Snapseed is very easy to use and presents everything in a clear and concise way. With it, anyone can turn a good photo into a great photo for just $4.99.
So, What are you waiting for? Grab Snapseed at the App Store now.