A few years ago, Google Maps was on everyone’s lips because of what it meant on a technological level. Currently, and unfortunately, it goes more unnoticed. Navigation apps like Waze or Google Maps take the cake (Google Maps is Google’s darling, as the latest update shows) and keeping an eye on any point on the planet from your mobile… is very popular.
However, although it may no longer be interesting to travel from mobile, Google Earth hides a trick: it is a perfect application to make wallpapers most striking and original. And we are going to tell you how we do it.
Google has two great apps for making wallpapers: Earth and Snapseep
Obviously, the first thing to do is download Google Earth since you probably won’t have it on your phone. You can do it from this link directly to the Play Store. Since you are in the store, take the opportunity to download Snapseed. You can find it at this link, it is Google’s photo retouching app and you will need it later.
Once you have both applications, it is time to open Google Earth. After initial sighting of Earth, You have to do a couple of tweaks in the configuration:
- Select the three parallel lines at the top right and click on ‘Map Style’.
- There, select ‘Simplified’ so that labels, borders and other indicative elements are not displayed. Now that you are, click on ‘Activate 3D buildings’, although we leave this to your choice.
- Go back and select ‘Settings’. Navigate to the ‘General’ section and enter ‘Rendering quality’.
- Since what we are looking for here is that the image is attractive, you must select ‘The highest’.
done these, You already have all the ingredients to start browsing the map looking for beautiful corners and capable of being a wallpaper. Remember that, to navigate, you can scroll with one finger, scroll vertically with two fingers at the same time to change the perspective, use the pinch gestures to zoom in or out, and the rotation gesture with two fingers to… rotate .
The last one is an overhead image of Mount Fuji. It didn’t come in whole with all rendering, so I looked for the chestnuts
Even if you have selected the highest rendering quality, it is possible that some areas (such as mountains) due to their dimensions show areas of the map without rendering. Here I advise you, instead of looking to cover the entire mountain or area, look for a more abstract approach like shapes or colors.
When you have the plane that you want to turn into a wallpaper, Go back to the menu with the three parallel stripes and click on ‘Create postcard’. The Google Earth name will be saved, but don’t worry about that, we’ll remove it later. Save the image where you want (I have done it in files), it is time to edit the image to create the background.
We go to Snapseed or our favorite retouching application and the first thing I recommend doing is removing the Google Earth logo. In the crop options, select the crop provided to keep the mobile screen format and the rest is left to your liking.
Add texture, change colors, use filters, play with contrast values, brightness and saturation… whatever you want. If you want to go a step further, you can give your background a pass with an AI-based scaling tool, but it wouldn’t really be necessary.
And voila, investing a little while, you can get a very interesting collection of wallpapers for your mobile thanks to Google Eearth.
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