Google+ brings power to online photo editing (pictures)

With an infusion of Snapseed image-editing technology, Google+ has built in a range of options for common photo adjustments and customizable filter effects. The Google+ tilt-shift tool lets you adjust the position and strength of the blurring effect as well as fiddle with contrast, brightness, and saturation. Google has kept a steady emphasis on improving photos for its social-network site, largely replacing the old Picasa Web Albums with Google+.

Click to read more about the new Google+ photography tools.

Google+ photo editing offers a variety of customizable black-and-white conversion options, including color filters that simulate the behavior of screw-on filters that attach to cameras.

If you don't want all the photo-editing options Google+ offers, you can also just fiddle with the "auto enhance" settings, which start from Google's estimation of how to improve your photo.

To change a specific region of a photo, Google+ uses control points that can change brightness, saturation, and contrast for a circular region. The effects fade gradually to avoid abrupt edges.

Control points are tied to a specific color, so you can for example click to place one in the blue sky, drag the size slider to make it fill the whole screen, then drag the brightness slider to darken only the sky.

The control points let you adjust specific regions of an image, for example increasing the brightness in this shadowy region. The green ring around the dot indicates that brightness has been increased. You can move, duplicate, and delete control points.

The Center Focus filter lets you darken and blur the periphery of an image, brighten the center, and change the point of focus. It comes with a number of presets as well.

If you're on the fence, you can undo and redo editing changes or revert all the way back to the original photo.

Click to read more about the new Google+ photography tools.