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32 essential Android tips and tricks

Several weeks ago, we highlighted 40 useful iPhone tricks everyone should know. We got such good feedback from that feature that we wanted to share the love with Android users – who, after all, make up the largest proportion of the smart phone community.

16. Edit your photos -- or grab them from a video

Android makes it easy to do some basic photo editing, even if you aren't shooting with a fancy third-party photo app. Here, a picture of a statue is touched up on a phone running Ice Cream Sandwich.

  • By Jeff Ward-Bailey

It won't replace Photoshop anytime soon, but your Android device is capable of doing some basic photo editing that can make your shots look a lot better. From the photo gallery, just tap "Edit" in the dropdown menu. You can adjust a shot's exposure, add effects like "Fisheye" and "Film grain," crop, take out red-eye, and even adjust saturation and tint. Send the results to the social network of your choice, or choose to have them auto-uploaded to a photo service like Picasa – or to Dropbox, using the previous tip.

Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean offers another cool picture trick: taking a still frame from a video. While you're shooting, just tap the frame to take a snapshot. It'll be automatically added to your camera roll. If you're still running Gingerbread or lower, don't worry. The $2.99 Frame Grabber app will give you the same ability, albeit after the video is taken.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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