The Text tool is a lot better than you might think it’s going to be, with some smart-looking typography and layouts and plenty of control over size, position, colour and opacity. Then you realise you can zoom in with a two-fingered pinch action and the brush gets progressively smaller, and in fact it can be quite an effective and precise retouching tool. At first it looks like it’s pretty much fit for nothing, with a huge brush and crude repairs. You tap or paint on an object you want to remove from a scene and it attempts to fill in the area with details from the surrounding areas. You can add lots of control points throughout the photo, each one with adjustments for Brightness, Contrast or Saturation.
Snapseed for chromebook software#
If brushing is too vague for you, you can switch to the Selective tool, which uses the control points seen in other Nik software for automatically masking and tweaking specific areas. If it helps, you can tap the Mask button to see where you’re painting as a red overlay. The Brush tool is good for applying quick local adjustments to areas of the picture, with dodging and burning, exposure, temperature (white balance) and saturation. You can apply horizontal and vertical perspective corrections and image rotation too – quite often, you don’t realise an image is skewed until you’ve fixed the perspective.
Snapseed for chromebook manual#
The Transform tool is interesting, though, providing the kind of manual perspective corrections you get in Lightroom, DxO ViewPoint and Capture One Pro. The Rotate tool lets you fix skewed horizons or verticals, rotate photos shot sideways and even flip them horizontally. The Crop tool is pretty self-explanatory and comes with a bunch of aspect ratio formats. Structure is a coarser definition enhancement which is really good for adding punch to flat-looking images and is becoming increasingly popular in image-editing tools. The Details tool has two adjustments – one for regular sharpening and one for Structure. The Tune Image tool offers a whole bunch of everyday adjustments accessed by swiping down on the image. If you’re using Photos on iOS, then you need to launch Snapseed first and tap the Open button top left – when you choose the Open from device option, you can browse through your albums. If you’re using Google Photos on your smart device you can find the photo you want, open it for editing and then choose Open in Snapseed from the drop-down menu in the top right corner. There are two ways to open images in Google Snapseed. In fact Google Snapseed is so good that it’s almost worth temporarily migrating images from desktop machines to a mobile device for editing and then sending them back.
Snapseed for chromebook free#
The good news is, though, that the free mobile version is just as good and shows signs of a little more development effort than Google’s other Nik Software acquisition, the Google Nik Collection. It’s been out for a while, so this Google Snapseed 2 review isn’t news exactly, but it is a chance to take a close look at a mobile app which is not only free but also spectacularly good.Īnnoyingly, Google discontinued the desktop version, which was a terrific little photo-editor and effects generator. It’s the mobile version of an application first made for desktop machines by Nik Software and then taken over by Google along with the rest of the Nik applications. Snapseed 2 is the latest version of Google’s free photo-editing app for mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, iOS and Android. If only – IF ONLY – this was still available as a desktop app too. Snapseed combines a huge range of filters with some dazzling contemporary effects and an interface that’s perfectly design for small touchscreen devices. The fact that it’s free is just the icing on the cake. If Snapseed 2 was a paid-for app, it would still be getting a 5-star rating.