r/snapseed

Hey all - We know many of you have been eagerly waiting for the Android release on Snapseed. After a few months of late nights and weekends, we’re finally ready to show you what we’ve been working on! But first, wanted to do a quick shout out to all the Beta testers on here that volunteered to help test the app and make it more stable – thank you!

The Android and iOS app will be updated to version 4.0 starting now. It may take a few days for you to see the update.

Our goal for Snapseed 4.0 was to make the app easier to use while also adding more powerful capabilities. As you give it a spin, please let us know what you think. There may still be a few rough edges, but we hope that you like the direction we’re pushing on. As I hope folks who have been here over the last few months can attest, we’re listening and committed to make Snapseed better - so if there are bugs, issues, etc please let us know! 

What’s coming to Android:

• Improved editing flows
  • A gallery, which in addition to letting you see all your edits, unlocks multi-image import and batch edits
  • Editing a batch of photos (select a photo from the grid, copy the style, and paste on other photos)
  • Pinning your favorite tools as you want so you can access them faster
  • Non-destructive editing (being able to re-edit a photo while preserving the edit stack)
  • A revamped toolbox that helps you discover new types of tools easier
  • Streamlined interface within tools that allows you to change parameters and modes with less taps

   

• Snapseed camera
  • Shoot with your saved, custom looks
  • Preserves originals so you can always re-edit in post
  • Free film-inspired looks
  • Pro controls
• Improved effects
  • Quickly adding masks to images for region-based editing in many effects
  • Updated Films options that accurately emulate some of our favorite historical film stocks 
  • Updated Portrait tool with more powerful effects
  • Unified Crop & Rotate into a single tool
• New effects
  • New, film-inspired looks from some of our favorite film stocks
  • Dehaze - adds or removes haze / smog / etc.
  • Color - tunes the hue, saturation, and luminance of specific colors
  • Bloom - makes bright lights bloom into neighboring areas to mimic film
  • Halation - adds red halos around bright lights to mimic film

What’s coming to iOS:
Many of the features above were already available on iOS, but here are the specifics that are coming as part of the 3.20 → 4.0 update

• Improved editing flows
  • Pinning as many of your favorite tools as you want
  • A revamped toolbox that helps you discover new types of tools easier, and should make scanning tools faster while also letting you see your image
  • Streamlined interface that allows you to change parameters and modes with less taps (i.e. you can see carousels and slider at the same time now)
• New effects
  • New, film-inspired looks from some of our favorite film stocks
  • Bloom - makes bright lights bloom into neighboring areas to mimic film
  • Halation - adds red halos around bright lights to mimic film

Changing the app and what’s next:
For all of you on Android, thanks for waiting patiently for the update. That said, I want to acknowledge that this is a really big change to an app that hasn’t changed in quite a while. Consequently, we know that many of you have incredible muscle memory for Snapseed at this point, and we’re asking you to relearn a couple of things, and to some that will be frustrating. We hope you’ll give us a chance, and want you to know:

• We are committed to keeping what makes Snapseed Snapseed, from the interaction paradigms (e.g. swipe-based edits), to the speed and control, to the fact that it’s free, with no ads, etc. I was a Snapseed fan long before I started working on it, and we take carrying on that legacy seriously. 
• Where we’ve made UI changes, they’ve been with the intent to make the app easier (especially for new users) and faster to use. Take loading an image - it feels very different, but for the vast majority of journeys it will be less total taps to get into editing, and it now unlocks multi-import and batch editing.
• We’re listening. If you check our engagement here over the last year, you’ll see that we really want to hear from you all, and that we’ve made changes and fixed things based directly on your input.

 

You won’t have to wait years for the next update :). With this change, our sights are set on continuing to add to the app to make it even more powerful. For example, we are already working on better RAW support for the app - something we know many of you (and me!) want. 

Hope to hear from you on what you like and what you don’t so we can work together on making this app even better!

-Giles & the whole snapseed team

Big thanks to everyone who's jumped into the 4.0 release and sent over feedback and bug reports.

We’re moving as fast as possible to squash these bugs and sort through your notes. We wanted to get this update out to you quickly since it clears up a lot of the major issues, even if it doesn't catch everything yet. We're already working on the rest. Please keep the reports coming, either here or through the in-app feedback tool.

Here’s what’s in 4.0.1 on Android:

New features / capabilities 

• Added Camera shortcut (long-press on the icon to trigger)
• Added Camera capture via volume buttons

Fixes 

• Fixed a bunch of crashes / issues in tools (Color, Portrait, Frames, Grunge, Retrolux, etc.)
• Fixed some issues with Camera that caused the app to freeze
• Camera Pro mode should always have access to Flash and Lens selection

A note on camera lens availability:

A number of you have reported certain lenses (mostly ultra-wide and zoom lenses) aren’t showing up as options on your device. 

Upon further investigation, it seems like certain manufacturers limit what cameras 3Ps can access. On these devices, Snapseed doesn't have an easy way to access the other lenses without a significant investment that would fix your specific device. So, for the time being we won’t be able to support the additional lenses on these devices. 

On iOS, 4.0.1 address a couple crashes and bugs.

When you seemingly have to wait longer for filter effects, they decided to add cartoon eyes that move around and distract you from the photo you are editing. Did anyone in marketing actually think this was a good idea? Adults who edit art photos don't want this. There are other reasons why I am not happy with the update being forced on me but the eyes take the cake.

Hi, I'm an amateur photographer and I always like to edit my photos on that app, and it feels a little limiting, the fact that it isn't on MacOS. Although I can emulate it using BlueStacks, it certainly isn't the best experience.

This is just a suggestion, if you ever enable it or have any news about it, let me know please!

Any other good / similar and free alternatives for Snapseed on MacOS?

Thanks !

Snapseed was a which I used back in the day when I knew very little about photo editing. It was around 2019 and the features it offered were great for an amateur like me to tweak the photos a little. But a lot of time has passed since then. Adobe Photoshop has become the gold standard in RAW photo editing on phone, offering really minute adjustment to photos almost like the desktop version.

However, the positives it had coming from a PC version was not intuitive enough for a phone environment so I often felt a lack of competition or viable option for editing. I've been seeing people being a little hyped up for Snapseed 4.0 . I thought to myself, what could be special about it? I bet it won't even be able to offer functionalities even close to Lightroom.

At last it was released for android, I installed and opened it up instantly. I was surprised by the complete overhaul of the layout, the addition of the camera. I opened up the camera, a little bit of disappointment because it wasn't able to integrate the stock like quality, nevertheless.

Went into the adjustment and saw the adjustment options, saw the new options, and different ways to edit the photos, and I'm glad to report that Lightroom finally has a worthy opponent.

The way of editing, or atleast adjusting each settings are so intuitive that I was compelled to write this review. The features are great, the new addition increases the functionalities of the app so much! So much can be written about it, but I'll just urge any of you curious enough to give it a try. You'll never find a better mix of actual pro grade adjustments and unique features of snapseed like grunge, halathon etc.

But, I've got my gripes with it
-No HDR support even though it claims it has (I'm using Pixel 7 Pro and tried with HDR RAW shots)
-Masking is too complicated, not all the options needed are present for masking (Although there are few masking features which even beats Lr)
-Output from the camera function of this app is not up to the mark (As with all 3rd party camera apps on android)

Do any of you have the solution? My phone has a dedicated 2.5X Optical zoom lens but Snapseed only shows a 2X digital zoom option?!

Now that the update is live and there's the facility to share Looks by QR code, is it worth having a sticky of popular styles to share our pics on here?

Vivo have a similar community for their smartphones so it would be great for us to have a Snapseed one now we have the capability

The recent Snapseed update has been fantastic and has made mobile photography much more enjoyable. However, there is a persistent problem where the preview in the viewfinder and the final image are not consistent. This discrepancy is especially evident when using custom looks, where the preview shows a result that differs greatly from the saved file. I have included two images to show the significant gap between what is displayed in the editing preview and the actual final output.

The look adds dehaze and contrast...

https://preview.redd.it/a6vg8o14yq0h1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=83ec74753e95c02a64d97fcfd9ff552d4b87395d

https://preview.redd.it/ykwvudu4yq0h1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eaa92e1a0d198be3a8c1312047378883c22d03f9