Instagram – a social media platform that encourages average chumps like myself to become ‘professional’ photographers. When posting a photo on Instagram there are various features that allow users to alter photos in hopes to create that ‘perfect’ picture. Some of the features include but are not limited to adjusting the brightness, contrast, sharpness, highlights/shadows, color, and most importantly filters. Filters change the dynamic of a picture to portray a certain feeling. Instagram has a wide range of 40 different ones to choose from. For example, the Nashville filter creates a warm mixed feeling along with a low contrast resulting in a ‘nostalgic’ feel. Even though Instagram provides an abundant ways to edit photos – it just isn’t enough for some users. There are numerous image-editing apps specialized for editing photos available on the App Store and Google Play that have unimaginable features. For example, Retouchify has features that can apparently get rid of unwanted wrinkles or can increase a tan (try at own risk – no accuracy guaranteed, considering that it is a free app).
June 2013 - Instagram made a drastic change to their social media platform and integrated a video component. Now users could upload videos between 3-15 seconds long by either capturing it in the moment or choosing one from their photo library. Why 3-15 seconds you might ask? Instagram decided to make videos longer than vines in order to give users the opportunity to tell a full story (Duggan, 2013) – unless you’re an auctioneer there simply isn’t enough time in 6 seconds. Videos are great especially for celebrities like Justin Bieber who are able to market new releases of upcoming albums, like Purpose or even film their personal lives, such as him skateboarding with some friends.
October 2011 – The Emoji keyboard was integrated into IPhones (Instagram Engineering Blog, 2015) and the world of social media was changed forever! With the evolution of this new ‘digital language’ emojis quickly became integrated within social media. Today nearly half of the comments and captions on Instagram contain at least one emoji character – the proof is within your newsfeed. Emojis add some fun and color to text giving and gives posts a little bit more of a realistic and relatable feel.
Users should be cautious when exploring all the new fun ways to edit their picture because over editing can make photos looks terrible (as you can see in the example below). Don’t be that one person who posts those tacky photos and has clearly spent a lot of time editing a picture. I mean if you are putting that much time into it at least make it look naturalistic.
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