You’ve probably seen the images circulating on social media. They’re photographs, but they look like paintings or even kaleidoscopic art. There’s a strange filter that turns the colors of that photo into pastels or sepia tones, making the image look almost as if it’s been taken in the 1950s. The common denominator between all these photos is that they were all posted on Instagram. These edited photos are called ‘Instagram filters’ and have become something of a phenomenon over the last year or so. From humble beginnings as an app developed exclusively for iPhone photography enthusiasts, Instagram now has over 500 million users who upload more than 70 million images every day. As a result, most people are now familiar with its filters because we see them everywhere: Celebrities, bloggers, and everyday Instagram users have made their photos look more like art than real life by using these filters to edit their snaps before posting them online.
Why Does Instagram Ruin Photo Quality?
1. The Instagram filters are not created by an actual photographer.
The Instagram app is not a photography app. It has no special features for taking pictures or editing them. The filters are all pre-made and ready to use in the app, but don’t take my word for it: check out the Instagram gallery of filters. You’ll find that almost all of them have names like “Sunset”, “HDR” or “Lomo”. These are not real names of real photographers who invented these filters – they’re just marketing names that make it easier to search for and find a filter in the app.
2. They’re usually just mediocre at best.
The filters you can find on Instagram are usually made by artists who use Photoshop to add some pretty effects to their photos, and they don’t even try to make them look realistic. If you look up the creator of a filter named “Chroma” or “Tilt-Shift”, you’ll see that they’re just a couple of random people who made those filters in their free time in Photoshop without any professional training or experience with photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom. This means that the filters you can find on Instagram are often badly made from bad photos with bad lighting conditions, leading to bad quality images overall – which is why most people upload their filtered snaps in order to try and get more likes on their pictures (even though many people will be disappointed by how bad their Instagram photos look).
3. They’re usually not HDR images.
The Instagram filters don’t use a real HDR technique because they don’t have to – they only have to make your pictures look pretty, and this is usually achieved by using a single filter that’s applied to all of the photos in an album. This means that the Instagram filters produce “fake” HDR photos, which is something many photographers avoid using because it really doesn’t look natural at all. Some people try to fake it by using the “HDR” filter, but they fail to realize that you cannot make an HDR photo without some kind of special post-processing (like Photoshop) – you can only fake it. So if you see a picture with the “HDR” filter in it on Instagram, be careful: it’s probably not an actual HDR photo and just looks bad because of bad editing and bad lighting conditions.
4. The filters are often poorly made from bad photos with bad lighting conditions.
Many Instagram users are quite lazy when taking their pictures and will often take their phone out on bright sunny days with little or no clouds in the sky for their snaps, which then leads to photos full of noise (like this one ): Why does this happen? Well, most likely because most people don’t know how to take good quality pictures in poor lighting conditions – so instead of spending time learning how to take better shots when there’s little light available, they choose to use Instagram filters that make their pictures look more attractive than they really are.
5. They’re often poorly edited with bad lighting conditions.
The Instagram filters don’t have to make the pictures look good – they just have to make them look pretty, and this is achieved by reducing the amount of light in the picture and making it look like it was taken in a studio with perfect lighting conditions (like this one ). This means that any picture taken in natural sunlight will have a lot of noise, whereas a picture taken in artificial light will be much smoother and less noisy (like this one ):
Why Are Insta Filters So Popular?
1. They’re used by millions of people.
Instagram filters are popular because they’re easy to use and they can make photos look pretty. This means that millions of people use them on a daily basis and they want to look pretty, which makes them very popular!
2. They’re simple to use.
Instagram filters are very simple to use: you just click on the “filter” button and then choose from the list of available filters (like this one ):
3. They have cute names that sound like food or drinks.
It’s not very surprising at all that Instagram filters have names like “berry splash” (although I’m not sure if it’s actually a berry) or “strawberry crush” because they’re really just brightly colored versions of these things:
4. You don’t need Photoshop skills to get good results with Instagram filters.
If you want really cool-looking photos that only require a few clicks in Photoshop, then Instagram filters are probably not for you – but if you want your pictures to look pretty without having to spend hours learning how to take better pictures, then Instagram is the way to go!
5. It’s easy to become popular on Instagram.
If you want to be well-known and liked on Instagram, then you need to take a lot of good-quality pictures – and this means that there will be a lot of competition for the best pictures, so it’s important that your photos are good quality and taken with a camera phone.
How Does An Instagram Filter Work?
1. The filter changes the color of the picture.
The Instagram filter is just a software program that can change the color of a picture, and this means that you can make your pictures look like they were taken in any kind of light.
2. The filter changes the brightness of the picture.
The Instagram filter is just a software program that can change the brightness or darkness of a picture, and this means that you can make your pictures look like they were taken in any kind of light.
3. The filter changes the saturation (or intensity) of certain colors in the picture.
The Instagram filter is just a software program that can change certain colors in your pictures – like reds, greens, and blues – so you can make them look more vivid or less vibrant by changing how intense these colors are (like this one ).
4. The filter reduces the noise in your photo.
The Instagram filter is just a software program that reduces noise in your photo, so it makes it smoother and less noisy (like this one ). 5. The filter makes objects appear larger than they really are to give them an artsy feel or to make them look more realistic when they’re actually being taken with a small camera phone camera lens (like this example ).
Final Words
The Instagram filter effect is like digital coloring-in: It changes the color of the image so that it appears in a different tone. The popularity of Instagram filters is widely attributed to nostalgia. It’s as if the Instagram generation has become nostalgic for the past before they’ve even lived their own lives.
