Snapseed has long been a favorite photo editing tool on iOS. It's packed with features, including the innovative “Selective” tool which allows you to very quickly isolate a region for adjustments based on color and luminance values. Huh? Basically, drop a selective “dot” on a tree, and only that tree will be adjusted. It's cool like that.

Recently Snapseed added two fantastic tools; Face and Text. I hadn't explored them yet but was inspired to because of the recent post by Christoper Briscoe, “Are You Ready To Dump Photoshop… for an App?”, where he expounds upon the virtues of the new Face tool. I started playing with them, then thought “I gotta do this on camera”… and here we are :-)

All three images were processed in Snapseed, live in this video tip!

The Face tool does several things at once… it finds the face(s) in the photo (and yes it will handle multiple faces at once, even though I didn't show that in the video below), and “improves” them. It will…

1. Brighten the face while simultaneously darkening the areas around it; i.e. adding a vignette that is centered around the face
2. Smooth the skin (albeit to some pretty ridiculous levels quite quickly)
3. Enhance the eyes

You can also select a specific skin tone, but in my brief playing, usually just leaving it at “none” worked best.

Then the text tool adds not just plain ol' text, but fun, stylized text that has become all the rage on Instagram, such as in the “bread” photo above. With the ability to scale, color and adjust transparency, if you can find a style you like, it's a pretty sweet tool to work with.

So, let's have a look!

SaveSave