How to Get Custom Filters For Snapseed

Twenty-first-century technology made it simple for anyone to casually snap a picture on the go through their smartphone. Even professional photographers with their heavy DSLRs sometimes opt for mobile photography as it is quick and requires no extra complicated steps. In that light emerged a number of mobile apps to save you the hassle of transferring your pictures to a computer in order to retouch them which saves time and effort. The most user-friendly yet quite functional image processing app out of the numerous ones out there is Snapseed.

Released in 2011 and owned by Google, Snapseed is a freeware photo editing software for both android and IOS which allows its users to edit, enhance and add filters to their photos. It is a fundamental app for any mobile photographer or a photography enthusiast.  Less complicated and more practical than photoshop, Snapseed is perfect for smartphone photography and offers all the essential photo editing tools for the majority of its users. In 2017, a new feature called “Looks” was introduced. This feature lets you save your edits as a custom preset that you can use later on and even share with other Snapseed users online.

Benefits of Snapseed’s Custom Filters

The custom preset feature is quite handy when you want to have the same theme throughout your feed so that they can have a consistent coloring and overall mood in all your feed. Users who are especially good at editing can share their presets through a QR code that Snapseed generates for your unique preset. Users who want to use the preset can scan the code to be able to acquire the preset.

Through Snapseed, you can tweak basic elements such as brightness and contrast but the app also lets you apply more advanced edits using curves, white balance, healing, and double exposure. All these edits can be exported to generate a preset. Snapseed presets are especially practical because the preset does not contain steps that could ruin a picture such as cropping. You can also edit a preset of another user and save the customized filter to your library.

Snapseed’s features are not exclusive to pictures you have captured on your smartphone. The app lets you edit RAW images which allows you to work on pictures captured using a DSLR if you transfer them to your phone. This gives you the option to apply your favorite preset to high-quality pictures in the highest resolution available.

If you are wondering where you can find Snapseed presets, a simple Pinterest search will land you on a goldmine of presets but you can also find them on Google Images as well as other designs and editing websites. Plenty of Youtube tutorials provide both the steps to achieve certain looks as well as the QR codes.

Steps for Using A Custom Snapseed Filter

To use the filters, all you have to do is to follow these steps:

1. Open the picture you want to edit in Snapseed.
2. Click on the “Edit Stack” icon on the top of the screen.
3. Click on the last one “QR look…”
4. Click on “Scan QR look”
5. Scan the QR you would like to try on your picture
6. Click apply when the app recognized the code
7. To save the filter to your library, scroll in the “Looks” tab until you find the (+) icon.
8. Name your new custom filter and enjoy it.

Once you navigate through different Snapseed filters, you will have an eye for the presets that best suit your style of photography and soon you will create a library of presets that enhance the effect of your images. This feature makes Snapseed one of the best photo editing apps as it has over 100 million downloads on the Google app store alone.