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How to EDIT a SUNSET in Snapseed // RAW Captured on the Google Pixel 4a // Develop + Selective Tool
Learn how to edit, like a pro, a RAW sunset picture in the free Snapseed app. I captured the RAW image using my Google Pixel 4a with the Google Camera app and edit the picture with my smartphone using the PRO tools that Snapseed offer (including develop module, selective edit & layers). I go through some of the common mistakes beginners make when editing their shots.
🔗Full-Resolution Pictures: https://lbaphotographie.ca/snapseed-sunset-edit
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- Google Pixel 4a Review: https://youtu.be/7wNDXsDKoCg
- Google Pixel 4a vs Canon 6D Mk II: https://youtu.be/4KY9rIr0ifE
- Capturing the stars with you phone: https://youtu.be/LwnMOsq0Mpk
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - On field capturing the picture
00:25 - Introduction
01:06 - Find the RAW file (in Google Photos & files)
01:55 - Open in Snapseed
02:32 - Basic edit with the develop module
05:42 - Details (Sharpness) Tools
06:32 - Selective Tools (local adjustments)
08:47 - Healing Brush
09:51 - Crop Tool
10:39 - Adjustment Layers
11:20 - Exporting & comparing the result
11:59 - Conclusion - Thank you for watching!
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- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
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#snapseed #mobileediting #mobilephotography
- 0:00 On field capturing the picture
- 0:25 Introduction
- 1:06 Find the RAW file (in Google Photos & files)
- 1:55 Open in Snapseed
- 2:32 Basic edit with the develop module
- 5:42 Details (Sharpness) Tools
- 6:32 Selective Tools (local adjustments)
- 8:47 Healing Brush
- 9:51 Crop Tool
- 10:39 Adjustment Layers
- 11:20 Exporting & comparing the result
- 11:59 Conclusion - Thank you for watching!
[Music] there's currently a totally crazy sunset behind me i really hope i can get some good pictures and show how tweeted them because this can be a really good example of how to use a raw picture good morning everyone yesterday while walking my dog there was an amazing sunset that i captured using my google pixel 4a for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben ma offord a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this art i asked on youtube which editing software i should be using on my cell phone for this video and the vast majority of you answered to use snapseed so let's set up the shot and get right into it [Music] now let's get to editing the shots so if you want to find your file right now it's actually not in the main off camera folder here when you open google photos you actually need to go inside of library here and go inside of the raw folder and inside of the raw folder then you're going to have access to the different shots uh raw shots right here i actually have another folder with my edits here so i'm gonna go inside of this one and you can see the picture that we're gonna be editing is this one right here but if we zoom inside of it you're gonna see it's actually terrible if there's no detail at all and don't stress out because raw pictures actually include a jpeg preview but it's a very low quality jpeg preview only to be able to create thumbnails inside of the operating systems or things like that so what we're going to do is actually come inside of snapseed so we're going to go on the screen here and search for snapseed open the app up and this edit works on ios or android uh whether you have a google pixel a samsung device iphone device snapseed works on all devices and it's completely free and there's no ads so for this it's a really great app so you can use it wherever you are so we're going to click here and actually it opened my raw folder because i went there before but i actually have it instead of google photos here so i'm going to go inside of here find my folder with the sunset edit select the raw file and if you see this little icon on the top here that actually shows that it's a raw picture so if we select this one it's going to open inside of the dev module and how stamps works when you get inside of a setting like here it's actually if you swipe up and down you get different settings that you can change and if you swipe right to left you're changing that setting if you look at the top of the screen right here you're gonna see it shows which setting we're affecting so here if we look at the exposure and we bring down the exposure we see there's a lot of detail inside of the highlights of the picture and if we bring it up we're gonna see there's a lot of detail also in the shadows there's quite a lot of noise inside of the shadows here so that's one thing you need to keep in mind uh when editing the shot so we're actually going to bring down the exposure quite a lot because usually you don't want to have the highlights that are clipping you prefer having dark shadows then highlights that are too bright so we're going to bring it down about somewhere here we're going to go inside of the highlights and we're going to bring them completely down this is pretty common when editing a sunset shot usually the highlights are going to be too overexposed so you can bring the highlights completely down then i'm going to bring up the shadows and one thing i didn't like with that like with the edit that the phone did automatically was that the shadows were too bright so i'm going to bring them up a little bit that's maybe not enough so i'm going to go back in exposure and just bring back the exposure a little bit over the shot here so i think this is looking pretty decently good uh if we go in contrast we want to bring a little bit more contrast but be careful bringing up too much contrast makes everything dark really dark and everything bright very bright so we might just bring a little bit just to add a little bit more definition structure we're not going to touch it right now it's a little bit like sharpness but i don't really like the result it gives us we push it to the maximum here we see it creates this really weird results inside of the sky so i'm not gonna use structure for now um saturation we can bring it up just a little bit but that's really one area you shouldn't do a lot of people when you're editing a shot especially when you're a beginner and that's one thing i used to do is you want to bring the saturation up to get all these colors inside of the sky but this doesn't look good at all this is terrible we're going to bring saturation up on the colors but in another way so we're just going to bring it up let's see to around i would say eight something like that just to bring up a little bit of the colors but not too much to be really annoying then temperature here be very careful so if you bring it up too much um it's gonna become too warm that's weird uh if you bring it down too much it's gonna be too blue so i actually want it to be somewhere around i would say something like this i think it's pretty good maybe a little bit too blue so let's come back here and really just play with it if you're not sure um what temperature you should be putting you can go in the white balance here and you can select different settings and this is the advantage of having a raw you can change the temperature as you wish afterwards so once you're finished with this tint we're not gonna touch it we're gonna leave it like that once you're satisfied with the result actually we might bring it down just a little bit to compensate that it's more blue now and i think something like that is pretty good so now once you're done with the develop module you can click here to exit it and they're going to open automatically some styles that are suggested but we don't want to do this because we actually want to edit it completely by ourself so we're going to go inside of tools and this is where snapseed really shines there's a lot of tools that are available the first thing we're going to do is go inside of detail here instead of using structure that opens by default we're going to go into sharpening and we're going to bring the sharpening up quite a lot so if we zoom inside of the branches here so we need to use two fingers to zoom inside of here and we go back on sharpening and we bring up the sharpening we're going to see it really brings some detail inside of the trees here so we're going to bring it around something like 55 to really bring that sharpness out of the shot this is actually what google does on all their shots they bring up the sharpness really a lot then we're going to go inside of selective and this is my favorite tool inside of snapseed and selective what selective allows you to do is to point a color inside of the picture so if we come here we're going to use the colors here inside of the sunset and you long press when you long press you have this little selector that appears you can come here and then you have a few settings for that so you can affect the brightness of this so you can bring it down a little bit so usually on colors on the sunset it's a good idea to bring them down it's going to make them pop a little bit more we can then bring up the contrast we can then bring up the saturation a little bit on these colors only and might bring up the structure just a touch bit on these colors and this uses what you call a technologist called u-point so it basically means that if you point a color on the screen you can add another one here if we point a color on the screen it's gonna allow us to affect the colors that are over um that are similar around the point we selected so if we select the sky here we're going to be able to bring it down a little bit so i just want to bring it down a touch bit might want to bring the saturation up a little bit on the sky and so now we see that the sky at the top is a little bit darker but at the bottom here is still pretty bright so we're going to come in here and affect the colors around here so we're going to add another point here in the bottom so we're going to go where it's more or less blue here and again we're going to bring this one down just a touch bit i'm going to go in saturation bring the saturation up a little bit and the last point i'm going to add is right in the middle of the sunset here there's another piece of sky where i just want to bring that down so you can see this one actually affects quite a lot the background is going to make the colors pop a lot more if you're bringing this one down then go in saturation and we're just going to bring this up a little bit too so now if we compare before and after we see that the colors are popping a lot more but we didn't go in extreme like you wouldn't want to go if we select this one here you really don't want to go inside of saturation and push saturation to max this doesn't look good you really want to try to bring some saturation but not too much so now once you're satisfied with this result you can come here we can select to apply the edit then we can go in our next tool which is going to be the healing brush so if we look inside of the shot here and i zoom inside oops that's an error and use two fingers to fit to um zoom we're gonna see here that there's a plane that passed by so i'm gonna zoom in as much as possible and i'm just gonna erase the line right here of the plane passing by because it's a little bit annoying um to have this so the healing brush is gonna allow us to remove this and one thing you have like the cloud right here you don't want to create one straight line through the cloud and the sky you actually want to only select here uh the part i was with the cloud so you can really get that done correctly oops again i select it by accident then you can come here get this done continue here and i think we're done here yeah that seems pretty good so if we zoom out now we're gonna see we don't have the annoying little line anymore in the sky of this plane passing by so if you're happy with this you can select and apply this setting the next one we're going to do is go in a crop so i think it's going to be beneficial to crop it a little bit so here we're going to select the original aspect ratio and if we go here i'm just going to crop it so we get a little bit less of the corner so like there's dead space on this side and there's some dead space on this side too so i'm probably just going to bring it up and there's a little bit too much in the foreground so i'm just going to bring it to edit here um use my rule of thirds to place the car on one of the thirds and then apply the setting right here which is a better crop in my opinion now if we compare quickly the original shot if you long press this is the original raw and if we let go this is our edit so you can see it's quite different from the beginning now if we come back here i actually want to go back in the develop module so if you come here you can actually go back and edit some of the settings you previously applied and we can come here inside of develop we can select here to edit it and from here we can actually go back inside of the settings here i want to bring up the shadows just a little bit more even if i said i didn't want to have the shadows up too much something like that i would say is pretty good i still want to have a little bit more detail in the front here then one thing you need to remember if you go inside of the different versions here you want to come back and reapply all these settings on the picture and then if we go back we have this edit so this is the original this is the final one so now we're ready to export the picture here so we can come here click save it's going to take a few seconds for the picture to export it's applying all our different effects so more effects we apply the more it's going to be complex and we're ready to view the picture now if we compare the results we got this is the original google edit automatic edit and this is our edit so we can see we have a little bit more color inside of the sky and i think the overall composition is a little bit better and also i find in this shot that the foreground was a little bit too distracting and here we got a little bit darker so it's not as distracting anymore one thing that annoys me a little bit with snapseed is that once you're finished with your edit you cannot go back and again you need to start over from scratch each time and this is the main reason where i usually use lightroom which i will cover in a video in two weeks if you enjoyed this video please hit this like button right below to let me know you enjoyed it and consider subscribing to learn more about photography and filmmaking see you in the next one bye
Video Links
- 🔗Full-Resolution Pictures
- 🔗 BUY THE PIXEL 4a
- Google Pixel 4a Review
- Google Pixel 4a vs Canon 6D Mk II
- Capturing the stars with you phone
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
Yesterday while walking my dog, I captured an amazing sunset using my Google Pixel 4a—and I wanted to show you exactly how I edited it in Snapseed to make it really pop. The majority of you asked me to use this app in a recent poll, so let's dig into it together.
First, I find the raw file in Google Photos (it's in the library under the RAW folder, not the main camera folder). When you open it in Snapseed, it might look pretty flat and low-detail at first—that's normal with raw previews. The magic happens when we start editing.
In the develop module, I bring down the exposure quite a bit to protect those bright highlights, then pull the shadows up a little. I avoid pushing structure or saturation too much—these are common beginner mistakes that can make your shot look unnatural fast. A subtle temperature adjustment helps too. The goal here is to stay balanced and not oversaturate the sky.
Then I move into the Details tool to add sharpness (I bring it to around 55), followed by my favorite feature: Selective editing. This is where Snapseed really shines. I tap on different parts of the sunset—the orange tones, the blue sky, the bright middle section—and apply separate adjustments to each. For the sunset colors, I bring the brightness down slightly to make them punch more, add a touch of contrast, and increase saturation a little. This selective approach beats cranking saturation everywhere.
I also use the Healing Brush to remove a plane line that crossed the sky, then crop the frame using the rule of thirds to get rid of dead space and make the composition tighter. One more pass through the develop module to lift the shadows just a bit more, and we're done.
The final result is noticeably better—more color, better balance, less distracting foreground. You can see the difference when I compare the original to my edit side by side. One thing to note: Snapseed doesn't let you go back and edit non-destructively once you export, which is why I usually prefer Lightroom. But for a free mobile app with powerful tools, Snapseed is genuinely great.