Edit on your phone for pro results

Snapseed has been around for a while, but it’s still a superb free app for editing smartphone photos. Expert smartphone photographer Jo Bradford shows how to get the most from it

There are now myraid editing apps for your phone, but Snapseed (iPhone and Android) offers a huge variety of different tools. They range from the familiar edits like crop and rotate to more in-depth techniques like curves adjustment. People often find the curve tool intimidating and tend to shy away from it, but it is actually very simple to use. Once you’ve played with curves adjustments a couple of times to familiarise yourself with it, there will be no looking back. For more in-depth tips, see my book Smart Phone, Smart Photo Editing, available from all good bookstores.

Snapseed curves: the basics

You use the Curves tool to adjust hue, brightness, contrast, highlights and shadows in your photos. In a nutshell, this is done by dragging blue dots, known as nodes, on a line down to decrease and up to increase. This very precise way of editing gives you much more control over your adjustments than is available when using the contrast slider in the Tune image tool.

When you open the tool, rather than finding a curve as the name suggests, there is instead a straight line laid out diagonally in a square box from bottom left to top right. This line, often referred to as the contrast curve, represents the range of brightness and shadow in images. Below it is the histogram graph, which tells us how the light information is distributed in the photo.

The core elements are: