Snapseed review

1 / 5

Snapseed is one of our favourite iPad apps, and it’s now available for Windows and Mac OS X too. This image editor is not quite the bargain of the £3 iPad/iPhone version, but at €16 inc VAT (£13 approx) it’s much cheaper than the likes of Photoshop Elements.

The interface will be familiar to anyone who’s used the iOS version, with a large preview and icons for the various processes on the left. They’re better organised here, though, with a clear subdivision between Basic Adjustments and Creative Adjustments. Crop and Straighten have been rolled into a single process, and so too have the three colour-correction processes: Automatic, Tune Image and Selective Adjust (which applies brightness, contrast and saturation adjustments to a limited area of a photo). Clicking Automatic adjusts the various sliders for you, but you can refine them further without having to re-process the photo.

Grunge takes things further, and makes photos look like discarded relics

The biggest improvement is that photos can be zoomed in for a better view – particularly useful when using the Selective Adjust and Sharpen features. The iPad version’s gesture-based controls are replaced by conventional sliders and buttons, but it’s the right decision for a mouse-driven interface. One feature that we’re not so pleased to see carried over is the restricted undo facility. It’s easy to undo and redo while making adjustments to a particular process, but after clicking Apply, the only option is to revert to the original state. This was quite a nuisance when we’d spent a while perfecting colours and then applied a frame that we decided we didn’t want after all. Export could be better, too. It can print, save to disk or send to email, Facebook or Flickr but there’s no control over the export resolution – emailing a 5MB photo isn’t a great idea.

Blur effects look great and are highly controllable

It’s the quality of the effects that really stand out, though. Each one comes with six presets, which often give superb results, and there’s plenty of scope to fine-tune settings too. Colour correction is precise and effective, and Selective Adjust’s system for singling out areas to adjust – using a combination of a user-definable radius and matching areas by colour – works brilliantly.

The Creative Adjustments specialise in the kind of retro film treatments that are currently fashionable with the success of Instagram. Vintage applies a colour tint, manipulates contrast, darkens the edges and applies a few subtle scratches and smudges. Grunge takes the same concept much further, resembling photos you might find down the back of grandma’s sideboard. However, unlike Instagram, Snapseed gives control over each element of these effects.

Selective Adjust is extremely useful for applying colour correction to certain elements within a frame

The Drama effect boosts contrast to resemble high-dynamic-range photography, and Black & White includes the ability to pick a source colour to convert – handy for picking out details in faces or skies, for example. Center Focus applies a circular area of sharp focus, blurring towards the edges, while Tilt-Shift produces a band or ellipse of focus. They both gradually increase the strength of the blur across the image rather than simply fading between sharp and blurred versions of the image, which gives much more convincing results.

There’s room for improvement in the undo and export functions, and we’d love to see photo management and non-destructive editing in the style of Picasa included too. However, it’s rare to find a brand new editor that’s so well conceived and implemented. It couldn’t be much easier to use, and the quality of the results is first rate.