Be a power user when editing your photos

Have you noticed that how we both take and edit our photos have changed? We used to take digital photos with our digital cameras of the events of our lives. Birthday parties, vacations, and holidays all had us bringing out the camera, shooting pictures and videos, then go back to our computers where we would transfer the photos to some folder system on our hard drive and then (if we were good) we’d back them up periodically so all those precious memories would be protected. 

So much has changed

First off… we are not using dedicated cameras but our cell phones instead.
Secondly the photos we are taking are less of events and more to more of our daily lives.
Lastly, how we store and edit our photos have changed as well.
I have gone “All In” with Google Photos to manage my the photos in my life. It has been quite transformational saying goodbye the folders on my desktop to letting Google Photos host them all. There are lots of reasons why you too should think about making the jump and I even do workshops showing people the benefits. Just take a look below and see how I have just under 50,000 photos going all the way back to the 1940’s

​But one of the things I have missed in having Google keep all my photos is the ability to do some advanced editing with my photos. This is where the app “Snapseed” comes in

Snapseed was a standalone app which was purchased by Google. They kept the app alive and separate from Google Photos and it's one I HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

Snapseed allows you to go deep in your editing to not just change the Brightness, Contrast, and do a little cropping. It lets you play with Saturation, Hues, Skin tones, and way more tools than I'll ever know what to do with. The app also does one giant thing which others do not. You can edit PARTS of a photo. Meaning, you can change the characteristics of whichever parts of a photo you want to.
Need a little fill flash on a face to get rid of a shadow? DONE!
Need a little light and color to the people in the foreground but not change the background? DONE!

Here are two examples.

The first one is of my grandfather where I was able to edit just the radius of his face. On the there images you will see the original, the editing of just the region of his face and then the final version

In the second example I took a photo of family in the Carlsbad caverns. I liked the lighting of the caves in the background but needing to make the family pop out.

So check out the app Snapseed… it's on Android and iOS but there is not a web version which I would love to see for students using Chromebooks... hey Snapseed, are you listening?