The future of graphic design and photography just became a little more “blurry.” With a new set of editing tools and filters for photos, Google+ is looking to make its network better suited to creatives. You can now apply basic adjustments to fine-tune, crop, and rotate images as well as apply Instagram-like photo filters such as “Vintage,” “Drama,” and “Tilt-shift and, to finish things up, add a frame, directly within Google+.
Apply these effects to new pictures as they are snapped or go to any of your existing Google+ photos, and click ‘Edit.’ Expanding on the Auto Enhance feature comes a number of basic and creative adjustments.
Those who use Snapseed, a photography app available for iOS and Android, will find the new photo editing options on Google+ familiar. That’s because they’re powered by Snapseed itself. Google acquired Snapseed for an undisclosed amount about a year ago and has since worked to incorporate Snapseed’s advanced editing features into its products.
Here are the new editing options you’ll soon find next to your photos on Google+:
Basic Adjustments
- Tune Image – Brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, and warmth
- Selective Adjust – Make edits only to specific parts of an image
- Details – Sharpness
- Crop & Rotate – Structure
It’s most interesting that you can now make these adjustments to entire photos or just parts of photos. This would come in handy if, for example, you wanted to make the sky look even more blue in your photo but you didn’t want to alter the objects in the foreground.
Creative Adjustments
- Black & White – Brightness, contrast, and grain
- Center Focus – Blur, edge brightness, and center brightness
- Drama – Tonality, type, strength, and saturation
- Frames – 23 frames to choose from
- Tilt-Shift – Brightness, contrast, saturation, transition, blur
- Vintage – Brightness, saturation, style strength, vignette, blur
The good thing about editing photos on Google+ is that you can play with your images worry-free. No matter how many edits you make to your image, you can always revert to the original.
How do you like these spiffy new photo tools on Google+? Do you think Instagram and other photo editing apps have reason to worry here?
