Android's Photo Edit Button
Photo editing on a smartphone has a stigma of being labeled with "instagram'd." Maybe most people prefer to put their images through filters and call it a day. But photo buffs may know about the hidden power in their smartphone called "edit button."
In Android devices, you can access the photo editor through the gallery. Here I will discuss Android's photo editing capabilities.
Android's photo editor is fairly rudimentary. At first glance you are presented with various built-in filters. These filters may increase the contrast, add a hue, adjust the contrast or change the saturation. To most folks, stopping here is fine. For me, I would skip the filters and move on.
The second button on the bottom presents various frames to overlay the photo. I don't like this feature. It adds unnecessary frill over the original image. Often times these frames crop the edges in an already tight picture and if you ever print the picture, you lose the surrounding details.
The third button is where the real fun starts. There are five tools that you can find in just about every photo editor out there. You can crop the image to what you want. You can take a fairly crooked shot and straighten it out. Rotate allows you to change the orientation of the picture. Mirror allows you to make a split, symmetrical image. And the draw function lets you draw on a photo.
All of those tools are incredibly useful if you want to fix an image. Being able to manipulate the photo's orientation gives you more control over the image.
Color and Exposure Controls are a photographer's best friend
While the five tools in the third button are incredibly powerful, the last button is what gives you full control over the photo.
Like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, you get various basic editing controls, such as exposure, contrast, shadows and highlights, and hue and saturation. A couple of tools I really like are vignette, which lets you add dark or light edges to the sides and corners of the photo, and curves, which gives you maximum control over the photo's color gamut (range).
While vignette is a personal liking of mine, the real power, in my opinion, is in the curves. Changing the curves gives you better control of what you want your image to feel like than any filter can. Some may feel overwhelmed by this, other may find it extremely useful.
When you take a picture and edit it in Instagram, it will save the final image over the original. In other words, once it's gone, it's gone. A feature of the Android Photo Editor that any good photographer would like is the fact that the editor is non-destructive. It takes a copy of the original photo and saves the result in a separate image. It's a win-win!
Android's built-in photo editor has some powerful tools at a photographer's disposal, but it also comes with a lot of unnecessary fluff. To edit your photo without losing the original is a real deal breaker over many other image editing apps. The next time you want to post an image on Instagram, consider editing it in Android's photo editor first. It is worth your time.
So what do you think? What mobile photo apps have you used that that are worth your time? Leave your comments below. Let me know what you're thinking.
Pros
- Non-destructive editing
- Orientation correction tools built in
- Many manual controls that photographers want
Cons
- Plenty of Filters I don't want
- Frames are useless
- Some exposure tools are just as useless to me