Last month we were telling you about the Cinamatic app and its generous offer of letting you add all sorts of “special effects” to your videos.
Back then, we were wondering how many effects were available for Instagram photos and videos and the answer we reached was “not enough”.
Today we have to praise Instagram for listening to its fans and followers and for taking interest in what tech journalists had to say. In an official blog post dating yesterday, Instagram officials announced that they are
delighted to bring you a set of new creative tools on Instagram with the ability to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and more. Inspiring creativity is incredibly important to us—and as the Instagram community grows, we’ve been excited to hear requests for more ways to creatively take hold of how your photos look and feel. When you go to select a filter, you’ll now see a new wrench icon. Tap it and you’ll find a tray of photo editing tools ready for you to explore. You can also now adjust how much of a filter you apply to a photo by double tapping the filter icon.
Instagram marketed these changes as coming from their understanding that you, as an amateur artist, need to have all the tools available in order to really express the beauty of a captured moment so that it rises to your expectation. In other words, next time you post a pic showcasing your Thanksgiving roast turkey, the turkey will look more like a chef’s delicious work of art and less like a dead bird on a table.
Beyond the veil of creativity, what Instagram really wants is to keep you using the app itself and not third – party tools to edit your photos. All self – aware Instagram “artists” have used at least once in their lifetime some extra photo editing apps and Instagram want this bad behavior to stop. Using the app’s own tools means users will take and post more pics at faster rates.
It is quite clear that Instagram introduced new creative tools to keep its fans, gather some more and resist the competition. The full area of filters include Brightness, Contrast, Warmth, Saturation, Highlights, Shadows, Vignette, and Sharpen and you can play with them as much as you want. To choose the density of an applied filter with the double tapping of the icon is as easy as it can get. Both iOS and Android users will be happy to learn the app is available for all of them, in the Apple Store and the Google Play Store.
What does the future hold? Now that Instagram introduced new creative tools, we might have an Internet full of beautiful and really worked – on pictures. Provided the users actually learn how to use the filters and don’t turn the lunch meal into some Dali – inspired abomination.