I love taking pictures! My phone makes it so easy. I see beauty all around me and my phone is always with me, so I have everything I need to capture the beautiful scenes even when we’re just driving down the highway on a lonely stretch of road in Northern Florida. I snap a photo of hayrolls with my iPhone.
I think hayrolls scattered on a green field are so photogenic! Then I view the picture on my phone and think … “it looks kind of blah, but that could be a pretty picture” let’s see what I can do with it. Still driving (riding actually, Jim is driving) down the road, I look at the photo on my iPhone using Google Photos. First I crop it so I can cut out some of the foreground and get closer to some hayrolls. I also tap on the Auto filter to brighten it up a bit.
It looks good, but I think it can look better, so I swipe up on the photo and tap on “Open in Snapseed.” Snapseed is a separate app that I have installed on my phone. It’s free from Google. I use a tuning feature called “Ambiance” and increase it to deepen the golden color in the hay and give more definition to the trees in the background and the clouds in the sky. I also use a feature called Details and increase the structure. I’m done.
See the results
My edited picture is on the right, the original is on the left. You can drag the center point to see the complete photos. All 3 photos below used similar editing features in Snapseed.
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How to use Snapseed
I love playing with my photos using Snapseed. The great thing is, that I can get to it right from Google Photos. First you need to install the app. It’s a free app from Google, get it in your iOS App store or your Google Play Store. All my photos are in Google Photos, so I can just open any one of them, then choose to edit in Snapseed. The process is slightly different in Android and iOS.
- Android: tap the Edit button, Choose “More” at the right end of the list, choose Snapseed
- iOS: swipe up on photo, Choose Open in Snapseed. If you don’t see that option, you need to force quit your Google Photos app and restart it. See video below.
Learn Snapseed
Check out our online course on how to use Snapseed. It’s a $30 course and takes about an hour and a half to complete.
- Installing Snapseed and “round trip” editing from Google Photos
- Exercise: Using “Looks”
- Using Snapseed Tools
- Understanding Stacks and Using Stack Brush
- More Tools
- Review