2022
Hey Local Guides!!
I'm a huge fan of Snapseed, which Google acquired in 2012, and 99% of the time, I use it for doing some quick and simple post processing of my photos before I upload them to Google Maps. I love reviewing places but photography is also a big passion of mine so I figured that I would like to share some tips on using Snapseed.
Snapseed vs Google Photos Editor
The simplest reason I can give as to why I choose to use Snapseed is the advance features and granular control. For foodie shots (i.e. photos as part of my review submission), I tend to keep it simple and only use a small subset of Snapseed's fairly extensive features. Even so, having that extra control over the post processing of my photos make such a big difference that the default Google Photos Editor just can't provide.
So, the tools that I usually use are:
- Tune Image: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Ambiance, Highlights, Shadows, Warmth.. I use them all!!
- Rotate/Crop: to get the composition right
- Vignette: Just a subtle focal hint
- Drama/HDR-scape: To bring out details in overcast/dark shots or to add some punch. Use conservatively though!
Capturing Food
So, in this post, I'm going to focus purely on perfecting that food shot where the star attraction is that gorgeous dish in front of you. I'm going to use this shot I took at Selkirk Arms Hotel, Kirkcudbright, Scotland (https://goo.gl/maps/uXQHipEnCFC2) which was the starter dish of local king scallops seared and garnished with brown shrimps, bacon crumbs, samphire and apple crisps! If you're wondering, it was lovely!!
The original shot:
The first screenshot shows you the full set of Tools that you can use! The first thing I did was use Tune Image. Second and third screenshot shows the settings that I used and how it looked like post Tune Image. Generally, I would increase the values to most of them; balancing Brightness, Contrast, Highlights and Shadows makes for punchier image. Saturation, as it says, just intensifies the colours and Ambiance adjusts the tonal balance, which in my head, just means that you can add depth or flatness to an image (I'm sure the pro photographers out there can correct me on this one!). I also adjusted the Warmth by making the colours cooler until the shell was a pearly white rather than a warm white. A lot of restaurants use warm lights that make food look more amber than it should be so Warmth is a really useful setting to adjust to get the best colour rendering.
In the next three screenshots above, all I did was cropped it a bit tighter, added some lens blur around the fringe of the scallop shell and then a final touch of vignette to add a subtle spotlight to the shot. You may notice that I didn't use the Vignette slider in the Lens Blur tool and that's because it doesn't allow me to control the outer shadows and the inner brightness independently. I also tend to find the default values for the Vignette tool to be a bit too intense so I reduce the outer shadow and increase the inner brightness.
I could have stopped there and that would have been absolutely fine but I then decided I wanted to see more of the dish so I went for a close up shot and added more clarity by using the Sharpening tool. Voila! The final shot!
Some Further Tips
So everyone has their own particular style when they post-process their photos; you'll have one too! So take everything you see here with a pinch of salt. Some quick tips:
- Take a wider shot (i.e. move away from the dish) and then crop to a tighter composition if need be. This gives you the most flexibility in changing your composition. Like what I did in this example!
- Have a look around and see how others are framing their shots. And copy, learn and refine to match what you like.
- Try to balance between looking wow and looking normal! You're not meant to make a place/dish look more glamorous than it actually is; keep true to the original form. This is probably the hardest advice because it's so easy to get carried away!
Anyhoo.. I hope you found this post useful. Have a play around with Snapseed and just mess about with the sliders and seeing what each one does! 🙂
Thanks @Billie_Tijuana. I use it almost all the time for the photos I submit with my reviews. I did try to use the Google Photo Editor which Maps defaults to but it just didn't give me enough control to how I wanted the shot. And yes, it does take a bit more time to do a review but for me a photo is also as good as if not better than a review so it is important to have a good photo.
Thanks @NalinK! Glad you found it useful! Just out of curiosity, which bits did you find useful? Friends always ask me what app I use to do my photo editing but they say Snapseed is too difficult to use or they don't know where to start so I figured I'd do a simple post about how to use it here.
@AdrianLunsong well most of time i like to use / edit photos to give a vintage look like this
before i found out about snapseed i used to edit photos from my laptop using lightroom but within first week i realize snapseed is far better than lightroom for editing mobile photos. also easy to use 🙂 also i have tried default google photo editor once or twice but i found out that its little bit complicated and i can not edit the picture as i wanted 😞 so am glad that i found out about snapseed .
ps : am expecting to do a post on mobile photography sooner ( hope it will be a worthy post for newcomers )
cheers !
