365 True Things: 13/Change

I happened to notice a new icon on my phone today: a vertical leaf against a gray square. On my front page. What? I look more closely. Wait: Snapseed. Snapseed? My go-to photo app? But yes: the reassuring graduated-blue-to-red pinwheel symbol has vanished. Replaced by a wimpy green leaf.

Okay, okay. I calm down. They just made it better, right?

I open the app, now called "Snapseed by Google" (uh oh), choose a photo to experiment with. I find some reassuringly familiar functions in the "Tools" section (replacing the old Basic Adjustments): tune image, details, crop, rotate, selective [adjust]. The few new tools—transform, brush, spot repair, vignette—okay, those sound reasonable on the surface. I can play around with them, see how they work.

So far, so good.

But then I get to the "Filters." Oh lord, please no, not FILTERS. I think of Flickr filters and Instagram filters, premade "effects" with no ability to fine tune. Basically worthless. The old Snapseed called the "filters" Creative Adjustments, as if the artist might want to have her own control.

But okay, it seems these filters have various controls. I recognize a few: drama, vintage, HDR scape, black & white, and retrolux, the last of which I never really saw the point of in the old version. But then there's "lens blur" and "glamour glow" (glamour glow? seriously?), "tonal contrast," "grainy contrast," and "noir." What? Who, exactly, is Google targeting with these effects? Not anyone who was already a user of Snapseed, I'm thinking.

And then I notice the absence. It slaps me in the face like a wet rag. Grunge. Where is grunge? WHERE. IS. MY. PRECIOUS. GRUNGE?????????

I could launch into a whole discourse here about change: after all, it permeates our lives, in small ways (like Snapseed's "improvement") and, most noticeably, huge ways (the loss of a spouse or parent or child, a limb, health). It's how we live, a way we know we're alive: responding to change. Oftentimes change is good, under our control, modulated, savored. When David and I rebuilt our house a couple of years ago, there were all sorts of disruptions, but we made the whole experience into a good thing. But sometimes change hits you so hard you forget how to breathe.

This Snapseed thing? It's about a 2 on a scale of 10. No big deal. Because fortunately, I still have the (long since discontinued) laptop version. And nobody's gonna mess with that. When and if I get a new laptop, Snapseed is migrating over. End of story. I've still got my grunge, and Google can do what they will to the app that I am sure to delete from my phone in short order. I can change with the best of 'em.