As technology continues to improve I’m more likely to leave my Nikon at home and rely on the camera that’s always with me: my iPhone 4. Not only does it take surprisingly good photos, the editing programs are just plain fun. In honor of my usual Camera Phone Friday feature, let’s look at a camera phone editing program that’s morphed into a desktop version: Nik Software’s Snapseed.

Snapseed combines the fun of one-touch camera phone editing with the higher quality images from your camera. It can not only be a stand-alone application, but also an external editor with Lightroom and Aperture, and works with JPEG, TIFF, or RAW files.

I took this photo with my Nikon, but edited in Snapseed on my desktop.

Day 26 - Before

Day 26 - After

The Edits:

  1. Send the image from Lightroom to Snapseed as an external editor.
  2. Crop.
  3. Use the Center Focus feature to sharpen my son and the boogie board and reduce the depth of field (blur the background).
  4. Use a Drama filter (I almost always use the Drama filters in Snapseed—love them!).
  5. Save in Snapseed, which creates a separate edited copy in Lightroom.

Fellow NAPP member Rob Sylvan has written The Photographer’s Guide to Using Snapseed for Kindle, a resource for both the phone and desktop applications (bargain priced at $2.51).

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

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