Fix your pics

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Improving photos on your phone or tablet with the built in tools
What you can do with the free app Snapseed
- Crop photos and correct perspective
- Remove unwanted details
- Heal damaged photos
Colorize black and white photos (about 20p per photo)
GIMP or Photoshop: the next step

editing pictures on your phone or tablet

Apple: iPhones and iPads

Go into Photos

Although all changes can be undone while you're working on the photo, it's a good idea to first make a copy and work on the copy.

Select the photo you want to improve and click on Edit.
There are many controls that you can use to improve your photo.
Your first choice will be Portrait, Adjust, Filters and Crop. With each of those there are extra choices.
- Portrait If you have a head and shoulder picture of someone this will allow you to blur the backgroup
- Adjust There are many different things that you can choose to help you improve your picture. The first one looks like a magic wand and will try to offer you an improvement in one click. If that doesn't do what you want you have individual controls for: exposure, brilliance, highlights, shadows, contrast, brightness, black point, saturation, vibrancy, warmth, tint, sharpness,definition, noise reduction and vignette.
- Filters There are 10 filters (3 turn the picture black and white) that you can try quickly to see if one produces the effect you want.
- Crop You can move the lines on the sides and corners of the picture to remove (or crop) parts of the picture you don't want.
  Top left are controls to reflect and/or rotate the picture.
  Top right are standard crops (e.g. square) and markup tools to write on the picture.
  Underneath are tools to straighten and stretch the picture horizontally or vertically. These may enable you to correct e.g. photos of photos
Remove the background of a portrait Press the person or thing you want to separate with your finger and hold it there until you see a white line identify the edge of the person. Choose Share... and then either Save image (if you want to have the person's picture without a background) or choose any of the other options.

Although the iPhone and iPad have very good, built in photo editing capabilities, the free app, Snapseed, has better capabilities in almost all areas (except for removing backgrounds).

Android phones and tablets (and Chromebooks that can run Android)

There is more variation in photo software in Android because different phone manufacturers set up their phones with different software. Most have similar capabilities to Apple Photos.

Android phones and tablets (and many Chromebooks) can all run Snapseed.

snapseed

Download Snapseed from the App Store (Apple) or Google Play (Android). There is no version for Windows or Mac but it does work on some Chromebooks that can run Android apps

Click on OPEN and choose the photo you want to improve.

The three icons shown on the right of the screenshot are:

o Looks (rainbow)This adds a style to your photo (e.g. Portrait)

o Tools (pencil) Many ways to alter your photo

o Export (square with up arrow) Save your improved photo

TOOLS

Tools to try:

Improve/change colour, brightness etc

Tune image, Curves, White balance, HDR scape

Apply a style

Glamour glow, Tonal contrast, . . . Noir

Straighten up photos of photos

Perspective, Crop

Get rid of things or remove blemishes

Heal

Give someone a smile

Head pose

Finding out more

There are many ways to find out how to use the many features that Snapseed has.

You will not cause any permanent damage to your pictures if you experiment - everything can be undone whatever Export option you choose.

YouTube has many videos that show and explain things in detail

There is Help available on-line, for example, there is more details on every Tool at: https://support.google.com/snapseed/answer/6183571?hl=en

and more general Snapseed Help at

https://support.google.com/snapseed?sjid=12240173766664025562-EU#topic=6155507

Colorize

Colorize is a web-based program that will turn a black and white photo into a colour photo. It uses AI to guess an appropriate colour so the results are realistic but not necessarily faithful to the original scene.

To access Colorize go to colorize.cc and buy some credits. The cheapest is for 50 credits and costs $12 (about £9) You will be sent a link in an email that will take you to a screen

Colorize Upload a black and white photo from your phone, tablet or computer and, a short while later you will be shown two colorized versions of you original. You can download either or both of the colorized pictures.

Restoration This has not worked well on the photos I have tried.

Alive photos Upload a photo of a face, choose one of the options and this will animate the face to show a video clip of the person winking, smiling etc.

Upscale Upload a low-resolution picture and this will create a high-resolution version using AI. (2 units per photo)

AI portrait This takes a low resolution portrait, upscales it and colorizes it.

Account Shows how many credits you have used.

Video Can colorize black and white film or video

Windows and Mac Computers

There are various web-based photo editing programs that can be used in a browser on Windows or Mac computers. Canva is one which is free and widely used.

Adobe sells subscriptions to Photoshop and Lightroom which are used widely by professional photographers and designers, however the subscriptions are hundreds of pounds a year.

GIMP has very similar features to Photoshop and works well. It is shareware which is written and maintained by a community of volunteers. However, like Photoshop, to use it you need to spend plenty of time learning how it works. If you do, you will be able to more complicated restoration and more sophisticated editing. There are many good YouTube videos and comprehensive on-line documentation.
You can download GIMP for free at gimp.org

As an example of their powerful features, both Photoshop and GIMP can use layers. I used layers to create a group photo of a family meal for my late mother in law. There were I think, over 20 people sitting around a huge table in the Vanbrugh pub. I set my camera up on a tripod and took around half a dozen photos on time delay to allow me time to get into the picture. There wasn't a single photo when at least one or two people was out of position. In one someone was pulling a face, in another the mother with a baby on the edge of the picture had leant back out of the picture. By taking the best picture as the bottom layer I was able to "cut out" bits from other photos to cover up the person pulling a face with the part of picture of him looking sensible on a higher layer. Finally there were two families who couldn't make it and I used photos of them to make it look as if there were posters of them on the walls.

Resources

Here are some of the photos I've used in this session that you can download to practice with.
Click on them with your finger (or right-click on a computer) and Save to photos (Apple), Save image (Android) or Save as... (Computer)
Please do not share these pictures as I do not have permission to use them outside this session.