A few weeks ago, I published a piece about photo editing on the iPad. In it, I said:
…there are a class of photographers that want to do more than just put a heavy filter on top of our photos. Let us tweak — truly tweak — our photos, like we can on the desktop.
I still am frustrated with the lack of a great photo editing suite for iOS. Photoshop Express wins my vote for now, but even it is far from perfect.
The stylish thing right now it to layer heavy-handed filters over photos, blowing the colors out and adding tons of vignette. It’s not a bad look, but its overdone by many people.
On the surface, Instagram seemed no different to me than the other dozen or so apps out there like it. However, this weekend, my view of the app totally changed when I bought an iPod touch.
Up until this weekend, my only iOS device was an iPad1, meaning I had no camera access to such photo apps. And while the still camera on the iPod touch is pretty terrible, its great for down-sized, heavily-filtered photos — just like the ones Instagram spits out. And since the iPod touch is always with me, its convenient.
Instagram is a whole social network, but one that only exists on iOS devices. In fact, the only thing you can do with the service from a desktop computer is to edit account settings. Friend management, updates and more exists only within the app. Much like the iTunes-trapped Ping, only users of the app can interact with the data.
That said, Instagram shares photos easily with services like Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.
The app — and the network built around it — is brilliant.
While I’m still not in love with the heavily-filtered look for the majority of my photos, it is a lot of fun to play with little snapshots throughout the day. You can see a collection of such snapshots I’ve taken over the last few days2 on Flickr. You can also add me on Instagram — my username is ismh.
While I won’t be using the iPod touch or Instagram for this year’s Project 365, I am still in love with them.