Latest news with #Snapseed
Arabian Post
4 days ago
- Business
- Arabian Post
Adobe Photoshop Launches Free Android App Transforming Mobile Editing
Adobe has expanded its Photoshop ecosystem by launching a free version of its flagship image editing software for Android devices, marking a significant shift in mobile creative tools. This move aims to make professional-grade photo editing accessible to a wider audience while leveraging advances in mobile technology to rival traditional desktop experiences. The free Android app offers a comprehensive suite of Photoshop's core features, allowing users to perform sophisticated edits on the go. Unlike earlier iterations or competing apps, Adobe Photoshop on Android supports layers, masks, and selective adjustments, all within a user-friendly interface tailored for touchscreen controls. This latest release removes the subscription barrier that previously limited access to premium mobile editing tools. Adobe has focused on optimising performance for the diverse range of Android devices, ensuring smooth operation even on mid-tier smartphones. The app utilises the device's GPU to accelerate rendering, enabling real-time previews of complex edits. By integrating Adobe's Creative Cloud, users can seamlessly sync their work across devices, continuing projects from mobile to desktop without losing quality or functionality. ADVERTISEMENT This Android version is positioned to compete directly with established mobile photo editors such as Snapseed, Lightroom Mobile, and PicsArt. However, Photoshop's brand legacy and professional-grade capabilities give it a distinctive advantage. The app offers precise control over editing parameters with tools like healing brushes, gradient maps, and curves adjustments, which are traditionally found only in desktop software. Adobe's strategy to offer the app free at launch is partly driven by the growing demand for mobile content creation, especially among younger users and social media influencers. The mobile photography market has expanded rapidly, and creators increasingly require powerful yet portable editing solutions. This initiative also reflects Adobe's recognition of shifting user behaviour, where mobile devices often serve as the primary computing platform. The app features an intuitive design, with contextual toolbars and gesture-based controls that reduce learning curves for new users while retaining depth for professionals. Additionally, Adobe has integrated AI-driven enhancements, such as automatic subject selection and sky replacement, powered by its Sensei technology. These features automate complex edits, allowing users to achieve high-quality results with minimal effort. Unlike Adobe's earlier Photoshop Express app, which offered limited functionality and required in-app purchases for advanced features, this new release is fully free and provides a more comprehensive editing environment. This strategic departure signals Adobe's intention to establish Photoshop on mobile as a core product rather than a supplementary tool. Industry analysts have noted that Adobe's move also serves to strengthen its ecosystem by attracting users who may later subscribe to premium Creative Cloud plans for advanced workflows. The free app acts as an entry point, encouraging users to explore Adobe's broader range of creative services, including Lightroom, Premiere Rush, and Fresco. ADVERTISEMENT The launch coincides with increasing competition in the mobile editing space, as companies seek to capture a share of the booming market driven by social media, e-commerce, and digital marketing. Adobe's trusted reputation and technical prowess position it well to capitalise on this trend, although challenges remain in optimising the user experience across the vast array of Android devices. Early user reviews have praised the app for its depth and performance, highlighting the convenience of professional tools in a mobile format. Critics point out that some features still lag behind the desktop version, and the interface can feel overwhelming for casual users. Adobe has committed to regular updates and user feedback incorporation to refine the experience. Adobe Photoshop for Android supports various file formats, including PSD, TIFF, JPEG, and PNG, facilitating easy import and export between platforms. This interoperability enhances collaboration among creative teams, who increasingly rely on flexible workflows that span mobile and desktop environments. The app also introduces cloud-based storage options, allowing users to save projects securely and access them anywhere. This integration with Adobe's ecosystem supports remote work trends and creative collaboration, essential in today's digital landscape. While the free app provides a robust foundation, Adobe continues to offer subscription plans that unlock additional capabilities, such as premium fonts, stock images, and extended cloud storage. This tiered model balances accessibility with monetisation, catering to different user needs. By embracing mobile-first development, Adobe signals a strategic pivot that recognises the centrality of smartphones in modern creative work. This release marks a notable moment in the evolution of digital content creation, where professional-grade editing tools are no longer confined to desktops.
Tom's Guide
28-05-2025
- Tom's Guide
Snapseed is the best photo editing app you're probably not using — and it's free
If there's one thing more amazing than the editing tools on offer in Snapseed, it's the fact that you won't have to pay a penny to use any of them. It's one of the reasons why we believe it's among the best photo editing apps for Android and iOS. Useful for casual users as well as professionals, it's extremely intuitive and packed with features geared towards image manipulation. Before we dive into the task, it's worth noting that Snapseed is a nondestructive editor. This means you can tap the Stack icon at the top of the editing screen to view your edits as layers, allowing you to easily undo changes or make further adjustments. Let's dive in to how it works. Launch Snapseed and you can either tap anywhere on the screen to find an image to work with, or select open in the top-left corner of the screen if you're already working on an image. Once the image is on the screen, you will see three tabs running along the bottom. Tap Styles (or tap Looks if you're using iOS) and you can very quickly alter the look of the image – just select one of the styles. For example, you can choose Portrait, Smooth, Pop or Accentuate. In each case, you will see the image change to reflect the style and, if you like what you see, you can select the icon. As you manually edit your image – we'll show you how you do that in the next step — you can end up altering many settings. If you like the resulting style of those combined edits, you can save them as a style which can then be applied to other images. This means you won't need to keep altering the same settings over and over again. To do that, whenever you have an edited image on the screen, tap Styles and swipe left on the options until you see the plus icon (+). Tap + and you can give the style a name. Remember to tap Save. Now comes the potentially overwhelming part of the app, but the part that nonetheless allows you to make fine adjustments and edits to your images. Select Tools and a menu comprising 28 tools will appear. Each of those tools gives you further options and, in truth, you could likely write a book exploring them all. But we can bunch some of them to give you a concise overview. There are some other ways, aside from Styles, to instantly change the look of an image. You can instead apply filters which are found within Tools. Select vintage, for example, to lend your image a nostalgic look and you can also choose drama, grainy film, retrolux, grunge, black and white or noir. For each, just select from the filter options that display at the bottom of the screen. If there are faces in your image, you may want to tap Portrait. This will smooth out skin, work on the eyes and brighten faces, ensuring subjects look their very best. The healing tool is also great at removing unwanted elements. Zoom into an image by pinching in on the screen and use a couple of fingers to move to the part of the image you want to manipulate. You can then brush or tap on unwanted spots to remove them. This is great for taking away distracting elements or removing blemishes. For even finer adjustments, tap Tune Image then select the menu icon to make changes to the: Brightness: make the image darker or lighter. Contrast: alter the difference between the lightest and darkest areas of an image. Saturation: change the intensity or purity of a color. Highlights – adjust the brightest areas of an image. Shadows – adjust the darkest areas of an image. Warmth: add orange or blue. In each instance, after you select which tuning option you require, you can swipe your finger left and right to make an adjustment. You can also tap the magic wand icon to get Snapseed to automatically adjust your image — it will assess the picture and offer a suggested improvement. When you're satisfied, just tap the tick icon or else tap X. If you select Details, you can tap the menu icon to change the structure of the image or edit how sharp you want it to look. You can also select Curves to precisely adjust the contrast, highlights, brightness and shadows. Just drag the nodes up and down to increase and decrease. You can select White balance to change the temperature of an image by ensuring white objects appear white. You can also choose tonal contrast to change the high, medium and low tones or to protect shadows and/or highlights, further building on the changes made under the Tune Image option. This brings out the character and visual depth of an image. Again, swipe left and right to make adjustments. And when you're satisfied, just tap the tick icon or else tap X. Some other very useful tools include crop, rotate, perspective and expand. Tap Crop then choose a size for your image and use the handles to cut away distractions. Tap Rotate to spin the image on a vertical axis or rotate it by 90 degrees. You can move your finger on the image to make fine rotation adjustments too. Tap Perspective to adjust an image's geometry and straighten lines. And you can tap Expand to go beyond the image's dimensions and create extra canvas space. When you're satisfied, just tap the tick icon or else tap X. If you would prefer to focus more clearly on a subject, select Lens Blur, move the focal point and swipe left and right to alter the blur strength. It will blur the background and ensure the central part of the image is in greater focus. You can also tap Vignette, it works in much the same way, you move the focal point and swipe left and right to make adjustments — but tap the menu icon and you can choose to alter the outer brightness or inner brightness. When you're satisfied, just tap the tick icon or else tap X. Snapseed also lets you tap Text and choose a font/visual style to overlay words on to your image. The opacity of the text can then be adjusted if you tap the central icon. You can also tap Frames to add one of many different frames to your image. When you're satisfied, just tap the tick icon or else tap X. When you are finished editing your image, you have a number of options. Just tap Export. You can select Share. This lets you send the image via Gmail, Messages, Drive, Bluetooth and more. You can also use this option to print or save to the Photos app. If you select Save, you will create a new version of the Photo. Alternatively, you can tap Export but, before you do, tap the three-dot menu icon in the top-right of the screen when you're editing an image and select Settings. This allows you to choose the maximum image size for exporting and the format and quality of the image. Finally, you can select Export As and save the image in a specified folder. And there you go! That's the basics of how to use Google's Snapseed. While you're here, why not take a look at our other useful photo editing guides? Check out how to use the best face photo editing feature on a Samsung Galaxy, or if you're a Pixel user, how to use the Google Pixel 9 Reimagine AI feature. If you want to explore Gemini's image-editing tools, we've got you covered. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
Indian Express
25-05-2025
- Health
- Indian Express
‘Perfect bodies, perfect lives': How selfie-editing tools are distorting how young people see themselves
Like many of her peers, Abigail (21) takes a lot of selfies, tweaks them with purpose-made apps, and posts them on social media. But, she says, the selfie-editing apps do more than they were designed for: 'You look at that idealised version of yourself and you just want it – you just want it to be real […] the more you do it, the better you get at it and the more subtle your editing is the easier it is to actually see yourself as that version.' Abigail was one of nearly 80 young people my colleagues and I interviewed as part of research into selfie-editing technologies. The findings, recently published in New Media and Society, are cause for alarm. They show selfie-editing technologies have significant impacts for young people's body image and wellbeing. Many young people carefully curate how they appear online. One reason for this is to negotiate the intense pressures of visibility in a digitally-networked world. Selfie-editing technologies enable this careful curation. The most popular selfie-editing apps include Facetune, Faceapp, and Meitu. They offer in-phone editing tools from lighting, colour and photo adjustments to 'touch ups' such as removing blemishes. These apps also offer 'structural' edits. These mimic cosmetic surgery procedures such as rhinoplasty (more commonly known as nose jobs) and facelifts. They also offer filters including an 'ageing' filter, 'gender swap' tool, and 'make up' and hairstyle try-ons. The range of editing options and incredible attention to details and correction of so-called 'flaws' these apps offer encourage the user to forensically analyse their face and body, making a series of micro changes with the tap of a finger. The research team I led included Amy Dobson (Curtin University), Akane Kanai (Monash University), Rosalind Gill (University of London) and Niamh White (Monash University). We wanted to understand how image-altering technologies were experienced by young people, and whether these tools impacted how they viewed themselves. We conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 33 young people aged between 18-24. We also ran 13 'selfie-editing' group workshops with 56 young people aged 18–24 who take selfies, and who use editing apps in Melbourne and Newcastle, Australia. Most participants identified as either 'female' or 'cis woman' (56). There were 12 who identified as either 'non-binary', 'genderfluid' or 'questioning', and 11 who identified as 'male' or 'cis man'. They identified as from a range of ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. Facetune was the most widely-used facial-editing app. Participants also used Snapseed, Meitu, VSCO, Lightroom and the built-in beauty filters which are now standard in newer Apple or Samsung smartphones. Editing practices varied from those who irregularly made only minor edits such as lighting and cropping, to those who regularly used beauty apps and altered their faces and bodies in forensic detail, mimicking cosmetic surgical interventions. Approximately one third of participants described currently or previously making dramatic or 'structural' edits through changing the dimensions of facial features. These edits included reshaping noses, cheeks, head size, shoulders or waist 'cinching'. Young people told us that selfie taking and editing was an important way of showing 'who they are' to the world. As one participant told us, it's a way of saying 'I'm here, I exist'. But they also said the price of being online, and posting photos of themselves, meant they were aware of being seen alongside a set of images showing 'perfect bodies and perfect lives'. Participants told us they assume 'everyone's photos have been edited'. To keep up with this high standard, they needed to also be adept at editing photos to display their 'best self' – aligning with gendered and racialised beauty ideals. Photo-editing apps and filters were seen as a normal and expected way to achieve this. However, using these apps was described as a 'slippery slope', or a 'Pandora's box', where 'once you start editing it's hard to stop'. Young women in particular described feeling that the 'baseline standard to just feel normal' feels higher than ever, and that appearance pressures are intensifying. Many felt image-altering technologies such as beauty filters and editing apps are encouraging them to want to change their appearance 'in real life' through cosmetic non-surgical procedures such as fillers and Botox. As one participant, Amber (19), told us: 'I feel like a lot of plastic surgeries are now one step further than a filter.' Another participant, Freya (20), described a direct link between editing photos and cosmetic enhancement procedures. Ever since I started [editing my body in photos], I wanted to change it in real life […] That's why I decided to start getting lip and cheek filler. Altering the relationship between technology and the human experience These findings suggest image-editing technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) filters and selfie-editing apps, have significant impacts for young people's body image and wellbeing. The rapid expansion of generative AI in 'beauty cam' technologies in the cosmetic and beauty retail industries makes it imperative to study these impacts, as well as how young people experience these new technologies. These cameras are able to visualise 'before and after' on a user's face with minute forensic detail. These technologies, through their potential to alter relationship between technology and the human experience at the deepest level, may have devastating impacts on key youth mental health concerns such as body image.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Yahoo
‘Reflecting on this photo, I feel emotional': Karen Weideman's best phone picture
The restored heritage village of Old Petrie Town lies about a 90-minute drive from the farm in Queensland, Australia, where Karen Weideman lives. She and her husband, Michael, were visiting back in 2022 when she took this photo on her iPhone 11. 'The town is spread across 48 acres of parkland, and some of the buildings date back to the 1800s. It has markets, museums and galleries; we love to just wander around, taking in the sights,' she says. 'You're also spoiled for choice when it comes to food; we had some incredible chicken satay for lunch. Then it started raining so we began heading home, but we passed these beautiful old buses on the way. Number 77 was a Brisbane city council school bus from the 60s.' Related: 'The plane I was supposed to be on passed above me': Nima Bank's best phone picture Always on the lookout for new things to photograph, she asked Michael to step inside and pose for her. 'He's for ever patient, and my biggest supporter; he has complete faith in whatever I'm trying to achieve,' she says. She later made some minimal enhancements using the Snapseed app. While Weideman set out to create a melancholy mood but leave the story open to the viewer's interpretation, her own feelings towards what she captured that day have changed with time. 'Reflecting on this photo, I feel emotional, as my husband now battles stage 4 metastatic melanoma,' she says. 'It feels as if he's trapped behind the glass, reaching out to me, and I can't stop him as the bus pulls off and his journey begins.'
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Health
- Time of India
‘Perfect bodies, perfect lives'
body image cosmetic surgery mental health Like many of her peers, Abigail (21) takes a lot of selfies, tweaks them with purpose-made apps, and posts them on social media. But, she says, the selfie-editing apps do more than they were designed for:'You look at that idealised version of yourself and you just want it – you just want it to be real […] the more you do it, the better you get at it and the more subtle your editing is the easier it is to actually see yourself as that version.'Abigail was one of nearly 80 young people my colleagues and I interviewed as part of research into selfie-editing findings, recently published in New Media and Society, are cause for show selfie-editing technologies have significant impacts for young people'sand young people carefully curate how they appear online. One reason for this is to negotiate the intense pressures of visibility in a digitally-networked technologies enable this careful most popular selfie-editing apps include Facetune, Faceapp, and Meitu. They offer in-phone editing tools from lighting, colour and photo adjustments to 'touch ups' such as removing apps also offer 'structural' edits. These mimicprocedures such as rhinoplasty (more commonly known as nose jobs) and facelifts. They also offer filters including an 'ageing' filter, 'gender swap' tool, and 'make up' and hairstyle range of editing options and incredible attention to details and correction of so-called 'flaws' these apps offer encourage the user to forensically analyse their face and body, making a series of micro changes with the tap of a research team I led included Amy Dobson (Curtin University), Akane Kanai (Monash University), Rosalind Gill (University of London) and Niamh White (Monash University).We wanted to understand how image-altering technologies were experienced by young people, and whether these tools impacted how they viewed conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 33 young people aged between 18-24. We also ran 13 'selfie-editing' group workshops with 56 young people aged 18–24 who take selfies, and who use editing apps in Melbourne and Newcastle, participants identified as either 'female' or 'cis woman' (56). There were 12 who identified as either 'non-binary', 'genderfluid' or 'questioning', and 11 who identified as 'male' or 'cis man'. They identified as from a range of ethnic, racial and cultural was the most widely-used facial-editing app. Participants also used Snapseed, Meitu, VSCO, Lightroom and the built-in beauty filters which are now standard in newer Apple or Samsung practices varied from those who irregularly made only minor edits such as lighting and cropping, to those who regularly used beauty apps and altered their faces and bodies in forensic detail, mimicking cosmetic surgical one third of participants described currently or previously making dramatic or 'structural' edits through changing the dimensions of facial features. These edits included reshaping noses, cheeks, head size, shoulders or waist 'cinching'.Young people told us that selfie taking and editing was an important way of showing 'who they are' to the one participant told us, it's a way of saying 'I'm here, I exist'. But they also said the price of being online, and posting photos of themselves, meant they were aware of being seen alongside a set of images showing 'perfect bodies and perfect lives'.Participants told us they assume 'everyone's photos have been edited'. To keep up with this high standard, they needed to also be adept at editing photos to display their 'best self' – aligning with gendered and racialised beauty apps and filters were seen as a normal and expected way to achieve this. However, using these apps was described as a 'slippery slope', or a 'Pandora's box', where 'once you start editing it's hard to stop'.Young women in particular described feeling that the 'baseline standard to just feel normal' feels higher than ever, and that appearance pressures are felt image-altering technologies such as beauty filters and editing apps are encouraging them to want to change their appearance 'in real life' through cosmetic non-surgical procedures such as fillers and one participant, Amber (19), told us: 'I feel like a lot of plastic surgeries are now one step further than a filter.'Another participant, Freya (20), described a direct link between editing photos and cosmetic enhancement since I started [editing my body in photos], I wanted to change it in real life […] That's why I decided to start getting lip and cheek the relationship between technology and the human experienceThese findings suggest image-editing technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) filters and selfie-editing apps, have significant impacts for young people's body image and rapid expansion of generative AI in 'beauty cam' technologies in the cosmetic and beauty retail industries makes it imperative to study these impacts, as well as how young people experience these new cameras are able to visualise 'before and after' on a user's face with minute forensic technologies, through their potential to alter the relationship between technology and the human experience at the deepest level, may have devastating impacts on key youthconcerns such as body image.
