A non-destructive Snapseed engine arrives on iOS

I’m delighted to say that we’ve rewritten the Snapseed editing pipeline from the ground up, making it non-destructive & setting the stage for a really exciting future. Just yesterday it arrived on iOS inside the new Google+ app (which, by the way, offers to back up all your photos & videos for free). Engineer Todd Bogdan writes,

Easily perfect your photos with a powerful new editing suite in the Google+ app for iPhone and iPad. With these Snapseed-inspired tools you can crop, rotate, add filters and 1-tap enhancements like Drama, Retrolux, and HDR Scape, and more. Add a personal touch to your photos, then easily share them with friends and family. As an added bonus: you can start editing on one device, continue on another, and revert to your originals at any time!

The overall workflow is a work in progress (e.g. right now you don’t get an interface for re-editing your adjustments), but stay tuned: we’re starting to cook with gas.

One thought on “A non-destructive Snapseed engine arrives on iOS

  1. A very interesting start. The web editing interface is pretty easy to use and convenient.

    Are you aware of the pitiful state of color management in the Chrome browser (at least on Windows)? I tried editing a photo uploaded from a phone on a Windows machine and simply can’t, because I was using a wide gamut monitor. The monitor is profiled, but Chrome only converts to monitor color space when displaying an image that is explicitly tagged with a profile. It appears that the new photo editing tools do not trigger conversion to monitor space. To be serious in the photography space the editor needs to honor image profile tags and the browser needs to assume that untagged colors are sRGB. Neither is currently the case.

    I tried using the new editing tools in Firefox, which can be configured to get color management right. Too bad the tools only work in Chrome. That also surprised me, since no extensions are required — just javascript.

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