Many believe that Instagram's recent acquisition of Luma means that the photo sharing app will soon be adding some cool features, including live filter previews and editing capabilities. Yahoo!, however, has beaten Instagram to the punch by adding all of this and more to the latest version of the Flickr iOS app.
Earlier this week, we reported on rumors that Facebook was planning to unveil Vine-like video for Instagram on June 20th. Well, if you take a quick look at your calendars, you'll see that the fateful day has arrived, and the expected announcement along with it: Instagram video is now a reality.
I was cleaning out my gear drawer recently when I came across a couple of holders for Cokin filters. The filters had long since been sent to an eBay afterlife, but tossing the cases started me thinking, mainly about how I hadn't missed the things a bit.
Want to play around with lens filters that add splashes of color to your photographs? Stanford design students Olivia Vagelos and Martin Bush want to help you out. They've designed a new line of color-splashed lens filters that can transform "the feel" of your photos.
As Google Glass ramps up to the point where it's eventually available to the general public, app developers are looking to get in on the ground floor and start developing for the platform early on. Naturally, several of those apps will seek to provide an Instagram-like service for Glass users, and the first to jump on this bandwagon is an app called Glassagram.
What would it look like if the retro filters found in smartphone camera apps were turned into a real filter you could slap onto the front of your lens? A couple of Stanford product design students think they have an answer.
Olivia Vagelos and Martin Bush have started a new camera filter brand called Mount July, which features the world's first multi-color, radially graduated filters.
Aberrations, distortions, corrupt images; all of these are things we typically try to avoid in the world of digital photography. But the Glitché app does the exact opposite. Instead of trying to remove digital imperfections from your photos, the app piles specific distortions on, and in the process turns your pristine pics into "works of digital art" ... at least that's what they're calling them.
At CES 2013 earlier this year, Hoya showed off a new series of lens filters called the HD2. The main feature of the filter set is its strength: each filter uses hardened glass that can take a serious beating without getting damaged or shattering.
Retro filters are still doing their steady march toward becoming ubiquitous across camera and photo-sharing mobile apps. Today, Google announced a new update to its iPhone and Android Google+ apps that adds these filters for people who want to make their photographs look "retro."
Last year we shared a clever "real world Instagram filter" concept called InstaCRT, which took submitted photos and rephotographed them on a real CRT monitor to capture a CRT look. Seeing the success of that project, Ray-Ban has decided to use the same idea in a clever bit of marketing to promote its Ambermatic sunglasses.
To show people what the world looks like through sunglasses fitted with Ambermatic lenses, the company launched an iOS camera app called Ray-Ban Ambermatic. It can apply a yellow tint to your photos using a real pair of Ambermatic glasses.
If you've been closely following the story of Instagram and its role in the world of casual photography, you might enjoy this humorous short film by photographer Grant McGuire. It's titled "Filter My Life."
French optical filter company Cokin has launched a new line of lens filters under the brand name Pure Harmonie. The new filters are unique in that they're the thinnest and lightest in the world -- the UV filter in the set measures only 3.3mm (~0.13in) thick!
When you think "Instagram competitor," the first app that comes to mind is Flickr's new offering. Having released just in time for Instagram to royally annoy its users with the proposed ToS changes, disgruntled Instagrammers flocked to Flickr in droves.
But there's a new kid gaining popularity on the lo-fi block that does exactly what Instagram does, only more... German. It's the EyeEm app, and it's been climbing the charts so fiercely that it has established itself as a legitimate Instagram competitor in little more than a week.
We've featured Instagram-inspired presets for Lightroom in the past, and today a new challenger has emerged. The folks over at Really Nice Images has released a couple of preset packs that are designed to faithfully imitate the look of Instagram's popular filters. What's unique about this new offering is that the presets aren't limited to the latest version of the mobile app's filters -- there's also a pack containing the classic filters that were replaced after Instagram Version 2 came out.
It was about this time last year that the world was introduced to the Holga iPhone case: a strange-looking gizmo complete with a rotary wheel packing 9 separate lo-fi filters for the toy-camera, retro lover in you. Well, much like the Swivl we reported on yesterday, Holga has decided that bigger is better, and is attempting to break into the DSLR market with a new rotary wheel lens for DSLRs.
Flickr is the latest photo sharing service to shift its mobile offering to become more like Instagram. Just two days after Twitter launched photo filters for its mobile app, Flickr has updated its official iPhone app with the same feature.
Well that was fast... Just hours after Instagram launched a major update to its popular photo sharing app, Twitter dropped a bomb on the industry by finally unveiling its own long-awaited and recently-leaked retro filters. The move brings it into direct competition with what Instagram offers -- the two services virtually offer the same product now, except Instagram is solely focused on images while Twitter lets you Tweet text as well.
The mobile photo sharing wars are heating up, and two of the big players, Instagram and Twitter, are in the process of trading blows. Back in November, it came to light that Twitter is currently working to build Instagram-style retro filters into its smartphone apps. Instagram retaliated this week by announcing that its photos will soon no longer be embeddable on Twitter. The latest news now is that Twitter is trying to spoil Instagram's holidays by pushing out its new filters by year's end.
You know those handle-equipped glasses called 'lorgnettes' that were popular among fashionable women in the 19th century? Instead of being fixed to your face, the spectacles were simply held up to your eyes with one hand, and were used mainly for style rather than vision correction. Kenko's new Filter Stick is kinda like that, except for camera lenses instead of booshie eyeballs.
Facebook wasn't content with beating out Twitter in the pursuit of Instagram: the company has now beaten Twitter in launching photo filters in its primary mobile app as well. Just days after The New York Times reported that Twitter will be adding retro filters to its mobile apps in order to compete against Instagram, Facebook has gone ahead and added Instagram-style filters to its official Facebook iOS app.
It's no secret that Twitter was interested in acquiring Instagram before Facebook swooped in and snatched it up. Now, instead of running the popular photo-sharing app, Twitter is waging war against it. Twitter cut off Instagram's API access for the app's "Find Your Friends" feature a few months ago, but that was just the beginning. The next major bombshell announcement is coming soon: photo filters.
Compact cameras are becoming pretty serious photography tools when it comes to sensor sizes and lens qualities, but one thing they generally lack is an easy-to-use filter system. Interchangeable-lens photographers can usually just find a filter of the correct diameter and use it with their lens, but things get more complicated when you're dealing with fixed-lens cameras. Although using filters is possible with some models, the systems aren't very friendly: they're usually proprietary, expensive, or based on unwieldy adapters.
That all changes with the new MagFilter by CarrySpeed, an easy-to-use filter system for compact cameras based on magnets rather than threads.
Instagram is in the process of pushing out version 3.1.0 of its photo sharing app. For iOS, the new version updates the app to be compatible with iOS 6 and the taller screen of the iPhone 5, doing away with the annoying gap that owners of the new phone have been seeing. While it's certainly a welcome improvement for Instagram devotees, seeing an app be updated for the new display isn't exactly a rare sight these days.
What's interesting is what the new update eliminates: live filters are gone.
Want to mimic the look of Instagram's filters using Photoshop? We're happy to announce that we have a set of Photoshop files that allow you to do just that.
Designed exclusively for PetaPixel by Eric Öhman of Skellefteå, Sweden, the pack comes with 20 filters that imitate the look of the popular mobile photo sharing app.
Photographer Casey McCallister reverse engineered Instagram’s filters, turning them into actions and presets …
Still shoot film? Use filters when you shoot? FilterCalc is a new Android app that’s designed to help non-TTL …
UV lens filters are a popular way to protect the front element of lenses from damage, but you should make sure you invest in a high-quality one unless you want to make a huge sacrifice in image quality.
You know society has gone a little filter-crazy when a concept for Instagram glasses shows up on the scene, but we have to admit that Instaglasses make for an interesting idea. The basic premise is that Instagram fanatics aficionados would be able to use these to always see the world in filters. When they then glimpsed a scene that looked especially artsy with the Amaro or Inkwell filters applied, they could use a button on the side of the glasses to capture and upload that image to Instagram.
I am not anti-Instgram, nor am I anti-cellphone photography. But there is a tendency to believe that the art filters that are readily available with many cellphone photo apps somehow “improve” reality. Many of the frequently used filters either significantly boost color saturation, or try to give the appearance of an antiqued, polaroid-esque photo.
But this doesn’t mean it’s better than a more true-to-life image. To prove my point, here are a few iconic photos “re-taken” with art filters a la Instagram. Do you agree?
For those of you who’ve ever wondered what it takes to get your work into National Geographic, here’s a …
What do you get if you apply every Instagram filter to a single photograph? Belgian blog …
Although everyone has an opinion on Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $1b, I think we can all agree: Instagram is terrible for photographers (Gotcha). Why? Let’s count the ways.
Instant is a newly launched Mac application that brings an Instagram-esque, Polaroid-faking app …
Did you know that you can use Photoshop’s Match Color feature to turn old paintings into “filters” for your …
Holga is selling an iPhone Lens Filter Kit that packs 9 separate “retro” …
The Fader has published an interview with …
Using a filter is a great way to protect your lens from damage, but if you accidentally drop your …
The success of Instagram has shown that photo filters are very much in demand with the general population. Facebook is rumored to be working on its own retro filters, but Google has beaten it to the punch: today the company introduced a wide range of creative filters to Google+'s Creative Kit. The filters (called "Effects") include looks that mimic daguerreotypes, Reala 400 film, Polaroid pictures, Lomo, Holga, and even cross processed film.
Product developer and part-time wedding photographer Joel Malone has come up with a …
Instagram released a new update today in response to user complaints regarding the …