I’ve been pretty happy with Google’s free Snapseed photo editing app for iOS, and today’s update to version 2.9 just made me a lot happier. The company added non-destructive RAW support for those who want to edit images from their DSLRs, a new tool for editing faces, and more.
The face editing tool is pretty amazing, adding more clarity to eyes and smoothing skin to an adjustable set of levels. It’s really well done — take a somewhat stark looking portrait and run it through the Face tool, and it’s like the subject was given a pro makeup job before the photo was taken. Pores and wrinkles are less obvious, and the entire face looks much smoother.
A new Text tool offers a way to add text and “bubbles” to your photos, all with various opacities, colors, typefaces, and location. There’s even a way to invert the text, making the photo show “through” it.
The sample photos below show a really crappy selfie, then the same photo run through the Face and Text tool to make what looks almost like a book cover…or maybe it’s the latest issue of “Steve Magazine”.
RAW support is going to be great, especially on the iPad Pro. Snapseed on iOS supports RAW images from 144 camera models, which means that files can be imported onto the devices, then fixed with white balance adjustments, adding or smoothing details, and more. There’s a list of the cameras here on the Snapseed Google+ group. I was thrilled to see that my Canon DSLR was supported.
Shooting RAW and then editing the images in Snapseed gives you another set of choices; you can then set the JPG compression rate or save as lossless PNG files when you export them. The RAW capabilities were brought about by Apple’s announcement that iOS 10 will support RAW image editing, and Snapseed actually lets you try out that feature before iOS is available.
