Mobile Photography Weekly

- Hey everybody, Sean Duggan here, and welcome back to another episode of Mobile Photography Weekly. This week we're going to pay another visit to one of my favorite image-editing apps, Snapseed by Google. There's a really cool feature in Snapseed, that was added not long ago, that let's you save a series of edits you've applied to a photo, as a custom look, or a preset that you can then use again in the future. This is a really great feature, if you want to create a specific look and feel, and then use it on an entire series of images. But, there's more.

Because you can take those custom looks, and share them with other people. Let's check it out. Alright, I already have an image open here in Snapseed, and I've already applied a bunch of changes to this, so let me just show you what I have done to it. To do that, I'm going to come up to the Edit Stack button, and that's that little stack of two layers there with the backwards arrow, right next to the word Save. And then I'm going to choose View Edits. So there is the edit stack, and if I tap down on Original, it'll undo everything, and we can quickly go through, and kind of show you the progression of what I did to this image.

First, I went to the Details Filter, and applied some structure, so you can see the image maybe getting a little bit sharper and more defined there. Next, I went into Tune Image, and applied some modest changes. Then I went to Lens Blur, and applied a Radial Blur, centered around the face of the clock, so the face of the clock was in focus, and everything else was fading out to a nice blur. Then we went into Black and White. Then I applied one of the Noir filters, and kind of customized it a bit.

And then I did a Vertical Transformation just to sort of straighten the clock out a little bit. And finally some Healing to remove that bright highlight in the background on the left, and also the reflection on the little foot of the clock in the lower left. So that's what I've done to the image. So, before we get into saving a custom look, I want to show you how you can copy the edit stack from one photo to another photo. So to do that, you need to be here in this view, where you can see the edit stack.

Next, I'm going to go up to the Little Three Dots up in the upper right, and I'm going to choose to Copy. So I'll Copy that Edit Stack. Now, I need to go and Grab a New Photo. And we'll go out and get that from one of my albums here, and we'll get this picture of the old phone booth. So, to copy this in, I need to go back to View My Edit Stack, so once again, I'll Tap that Edit Stack button up in the upper right, the little two layers with an arrow.

I'll choose View Edits, and then I'll go back up to those three dots in the upper right, and I'll just choose Insert. And there comes the edit stack, and after a moment, it updates the image. So, that's pretty cool. Now, when you're copying a stack of edits from one picture to another, there may be some things that don't work perfectly. So in this case, the blur is not in the right place. I'd like to have more of the phone be in focus, and also the top of the phone is a little bit too bright. So to fix that, I'll just come down to Lens Blur, and I'll tap on the left side of that, and then choose the little Slider button.

And now I can reposition this blur, and kind of stretch it out a little bit so it is oriented more towards the phone, so more of the phone is in focus there, so something like that looks pretty good. And I'll tap the Check Mark to apply that. Then, I'm going to come to Black and White. Now I know why the top of the phone is too bright. It's because of one of the black and white settings I used on the previous image, so I'll tap the little Slider for that.

And if I tap on the Color Filter button right there, I can see that I used the yellow filter in the previous image. And that's just because I thought that that looked best for that particular image. But, this picture has a lot of really yellowish tones, very bright yellowish tones up in that top corner of the image on the upper right so, that's not going to work well for this, so I'm just going to use the Neutral Filter, and that looks good right there. I'll tap the Check Mark to apply that, and then I can turn the other states back on.

Now notice that it has applied the Transform, and also the Healing steps. So, those are definitely localized things that were really specific to the previous image, so when you're copying an edit stack from one image to another, it will apply those very localized edits, and you may very well have to go in and modify those. Alright, let's move on to Saving A Custom Look. So let's say I like this look, and I want to save it out as a custom look. To do that, let me back out of here. So I'll tap the Back button in the upper left.

I'm going to go back to that Edit Stack button, and I'm just going to choose to Save A Look. Let me give this a name, and you only have eight characters here, so you have to be creative with your naming. I'll just call this BWBL for Black and White Blur, and One for Noir, and I think that's about... I might have one character left, but that's good. So, I've saved that out now, as a custom look.

So now, I can apply that to a new image, so let's go get a new image. And I'm going to get this picture here of this really cool tin roof with all these nice lights strung underneath it, and I'm going to go to the Edit Stack button again, and I'll come into where it says My Looks. And then I can apply that.

Now, I can just tap it to Apply it, or there's little three dots here, and I want to explain if I tap those three dots, what that's going to give me. So the default is, it's just going to apply the look to the image, and it'll replace any other edits that already exist. You can also choose to append the look to the image, and what that will do is that it will leave in place any edits you already have done, and just add the look on top of it. So, which choice you use here is just really going to depend on the image you're working with, and what previous edits you may have already applied, and whether or not you want to keep those.

I'm just going to leave that set to the default there, and apply that look to the image. So that looks really cool for this image, I really, really like that. Obviously, when you're applying a look to an image, you need to see if all of the steps are going to fit, so there might be times where you want to come in and edit it. So again, you come into the Edit Stack, and choose View Edits. And then you could go in, as I've shown you before, and edit one of those individual states. Now one thing to point out here that's pretty important is that, notice that it did not save the Transform step, and the Healing step that were actually present when I saved that as a custom look with the last image.

And that's because those are definitely localized corrections that were only specific to the image that I initially applied them to, and it's not something you'd want to save into a custom look or a preset. So that's actually a really good thing that they have it set up that way. Alright, let's back out of here, and let's do one other thing to this. I'm going to come to the Edit Choices, and I'm going to come down to the Vintage Filters.

And I just want to apply a little bit of a brownish tone. There we go, that looks pretty good. And maybe bring the Saturation up, and bring the Style Strength down a bit, just a little bit of a brown tone, I think that looks pretty good. And I will Save that. And I'm going to come back, and I'm going to do a new look here, and we'll just do the same thing here, we'll just call this actually Test2. And now I want to share this with somebody else.

So to do that, I come up to the Edit Stack menu, and I choose QR Look, and then Create QR Look. So it creates a QR code for this, that I can send to somebody else. Now I can send this in a couple different ways. I could just tap the Share button, and send it out as an Email, or a Text Message. Or I could do a Screen Capture of it, which I'll do right here, and I could have that on my camera roll, and air-drop it to somebody.

I already have emailed this to myself, so the next thing to do is Scan that QR code, so I can apply it to a new image. Alright, so let's go over how we can take that QR code, and bring it into our own version of Snapseed to apply it to this image. So, if somebody has sent you a QR code, you just want to go to the Edit Stack button, and you want to go to QR Look, and then you want to go to Scan QR Look.

It opens up a little QR scanning app here. And all you have to do is Center that in the Square, and it applies that look. So very, very cool, actually this look looks really nice with this image here. So, the one drawback to the way this is currently implemented here, is that there does not appear to be any way to actually scan the QR code, if you're only on your phone. So if you're doing a mobile-only type of workflow, and somebody emails you a custom look, I have not found any way to load that into Snapseed, and have Snapseed scan the image of the QR code.

You have to actually scan it somewhere else, whether it's on the screen of your iPad, or on your computer, or something like that. So that's a little bit of a deficiency, that I'd like to see addressed but, other than that, it's pretty cool the way that you can share these QR looks with other people. So Snapseed is a really excellent app that just keeps on getting better. The ability to copy an entire edit stack from one image to another, is a really useful feature, and saving your edits as a custom look or preset that you can quickly apply to other images in the future, or share with other people is a great improvement to this already impressive app.