Snapseed: Professional image editing processing tools for Mac OS

Snapseed is an innovative photo enhancement and sharing app with a powerful suite of imaging filters and tools for anyone, anywhere to transform any image into an extraordinary photo. Snapseed for Mac OS is the only photo app you’ll want to use every day and makes any photograph extraordinary with a fun high-quality photo experience right on the desktop. Snapseed combines technology from Nik Software’s professional photography tools with an award-winning interface to deliver a powerful new app for photographers world-wide. Anyone can create amazing photos with Snapseed by using its innovative filters and tools, including the company’s revolutionary U Point technology that enables precise selective enhancements to be made to any area of a photo. 

How Does It Work?

Easy enough: Like some newer photo-editing sorts of apps, all you have to do is drag and drop a photo onto the open Snapseed app to get rolling. You can use old-school menu navigation, too, though. I was a bit worried that I would have to use the Mac's menu/finder system to find photos to edit that are buried deep in my massive iPhoto library, but luckily you can also drag and drop a photo from iPhoto into Snapseed to edit it. (Once you edit it, though, you'll have to save it then import it back into iPhoto if that's where you want it. I like it this way since I don't want to mess with the originals in my iPhoto library.)

Once your photo is selected, you have a set of icons at the left that provide the types of adjustments and effects you can make. These icons look terrible, by the way, almost as if they are product images for separate filters or box covers for retail sale with a tiny little barcode at the top right. I don't know where these came from or why there is indecipherable text across the top of the icons, but I sure as heck hope Nik Software makes an update to Snapseed that cleans up these icons. In the meantime, you'll just have to ignore the stumble of these icons and focus on the effects.

The top set of icons (lets call them controls) give you basic adjustments. "Tune Image" gives you basic automatic enhancements or you can make it darker, lighter or moody. (Seriously, "Moody" is one of the settings.)

Crop & Straighten lets you crop and straighten the image, and Details lets you sharpen the photo. Don't ignore this effect. "Structure" somehow adds a bit of magic to sharpen and enhance some photos in ways I don't understand... yet it works.