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Photo Tips: Fingertip Photo Editing
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Adjust your photos with these new—and cheap!—programs
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BY BOB KRIST
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If the explosion in smartphone photography has proven anything, it’s that you don’t need complex gear to make great travel photos. But what about the postproduction aspects Even entry-level digital programs, like Photoshop Elements, come with a steep learning curve. Why can’t the simplicity of a smartphone photo app be applied to a larger canvas, like an iPad® or Android™ tablet, maybe even a laptop? And why can’t they give it a rock-bottom price, rather than the three figures that the full-powered programs sell for?
Well, they can and they did. Tablet-based photo editing and manipulation programs have arrived on the scene, employing iPad’s now familiar pinching and swiping moves to let you alter photos in an astonishing number of creative ways—at an affordable price.
In the Nik of time
The first was Snapseed (snapseed.com; $5), brought to you by the folks at Nik Software, known for great software filter programs. Snapseed offers a huge lineup of creative filters that can be applied with the tap of a finger: grunge effects, black-and-white, vintage or any combination. That’s in addition to mundane chores, like cropping, rotating and straightening photos.
There are also sophisticated effects, like miniature, a narrow sharp-focus strip that makes everything look toylike. And Snapseed offers a variety of textures, frames and borders. Once you’ve created your masterpiece, it’s easy to share via Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. If you don’t happen to have an iPad, Snapseed offers versions for Mac® and PC for a whopping $20.
Light touch
You wouldn’t expect Adobe, the mother ship of Photoshop, to be asleep at the switch. Photoshop Touch (adobe.com; $10) proves that they’re not. This entry into the iPad world is full-featured, powerful and still easy to use. It has the familiar menu system, like Photoshop, but laid out in a more intuitive way. Besides all the basics, PT lets you combine images using several layers—just like the big-boy program but with point-and-click simplicity. Using the Scribble Selection Tool, you can outline a subject and implant it in another photo—a task that once required painstaking work with a mouse or Wacom pad and is now as easy as finger painting. Currently, Photoshop Touch is available only for iPad or Android tablet.
Every silver lining has a cloud
The main downside is that these programs may not let you work on a full-sized version of your image. But really, that’s a hardship only if you want to make mural-sized prints for your next museum exhibit. For the rest of us, Snapseed and Photoshop Touch provide pretty much all the creative-image manipulation firepower we’ll ever need.
*Endless Vacation® magazine is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. iPad and Mac are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Android is a trademark of Google Inc.
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Published: Fall 2012
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