With the rise of social media came the love of sharing photos of everything and anything that we get up to. Some may call it vanity but, let’s face it, when we’ve got a bit of colour on our skin and our summer threads on, we all think we’re looking our best. So, it’s only natural that our photo sharing is set to increase now…
However, with the best will in the world, the wrong filters and apps can make an adorable pink flush look like the reddest of lobsters, or it can wash out your carefully-cultivated tan altogether. Read on to avoid such disasters.
As of September 2013, Instagram reported that it had 150 million active users each month and it has surely only grown ever since. One of its main selling points is its ease of adding and adapting filters to suit your needs. The added joy of Instagram is the freedom it gives its users to fiddle with the usual photographic settings – most notably, contrast, which in the pursuit of a perfectly presented tan will be your friend, ditto to saturation – and it can mean that you can make the most of your photos. If you’re after an easy life and elect to just use Instagram’s built in filters than think carefully about which one accentuates what you want the world to see. For instance, the ‘Amaro’ filter will wash out a tan but it will calm down sunburn, whereas the ‘Mayfair’ filter will boost your natural colour and make even the palest of users look like they’ve at least spent an hour or two in the garden.
Another must-have app in the pursuit of picture-perfect summer photos is Hipstamatic. A long-standing favourite of the iphoneography crowd, this app allows you to purchase extra ‘kit’ so you can use different lenses, film, and flashes to create your photos. Known as ‘HipstaPaks’, one of the news additions is the Brisbane kit which could help to emphasise the blueness of the sea and the sky; the Jamaica kit is designed to deepen the shadows whilst still creating vibrant and beautiful colours; and there are other kits such as The Mission and Brussel ‘paks’ which can help to create that hazy summer evening vibe, perfect for barbeques and days on the beach.
Of course there are loads of other apps that can help you to create the best possible summer snaps. One of the more prominent of these is ‘Afterlight’ which offers users seventy-four filters and various other tools such as textures, frames, and adjustment tools. Another app is ‘Enlight’ which claims to be “every photo app you’ve ever needed”, offering tools such as intelligent photo correction and the ability to save photos mid-edit to finish off later so as to avoid missing any of those magical summer moments. At the cheaper end of the budget (i.e. free!) is ‘Retrica’ which offers much of the same things as many other current apps – filters and the ability to create collages and watermarks, for instance – and has a simple design.
Put simply: you need never regret that sunburn ever again!!
