Instagram (free) has mastered the art of fast, mobile photo editing and sharing. With just a couple of taps, you can apply filters and effects that gave bland old smartphone snaps new life. A design refresh takes the app even further, adding editing tools that give the best photo editors a run for their money.
This update continues a string of improvements, such as tackling Vine head-on with video and Snapchat with Instagram Direct for private photo- and video-sharing. On iPhone, the most recent version of Instagram nabbed an Editors' Choice award, but a few annoyances continue to hold back the Android app.
Getting Onboard
Signing up for Instagram is fairly straightforward, and it's even easier if you volunteer to connect your account to Facebook. The influence of Facebook, Instagram's owners, is pretty clear, as you're prompted multiple times to connect your Facebook account. You can still create a new account using only a valid email address, but the layout of the page makes it hard to tell what information is required (all of it, except your phone number and Facebook).
Same Filters, New Tools
Instagram is smart; it doesn't try to replace your camera app. You can take photos from within Instagram, but it's just as easy to upload images you've already taken. Should you choose to use it, the Instagram camera gives you some basic tools, such as a grid, flash control, and front/rear camera toggle. You can also tap the image to focus it, but zoom is not available.
Once you have your image—and we must say, photos look pretty good on the Samsung Galaxy S5 we used in testing—you can apply Instagram's famous filters. These do everything from turning up the blues to bringing out the reds to discarding color entirely. The 19 filters may overwhelm you at first, but you'll quickly get a feel for their best uses. Take special note of the Rise filter, which can help bring out color in low-light shots.
In the latest version of the app, you can double-tap any filter to pull up an intensity slider that lets you fine-tune its effect. There's also a toggle to switch on frames, if a frame is available for a particular filter. This granular control is great for Instagram superfans, but it's smartly hidden from the casual user. We like these new controls, and the fact that you can tap and hold an image in the filter view to see your original, unadorned image.
Hidden within a new wrench icon are all-new photo editing tools, including brightness, contrast, warmth, highlights, shadows, and vignette controls. Most users probably won't futz with these, but anyone already familiar with photo editing will love them.
Also hidden within the wrench menu are the tilt-shift tools. They still come in two flavors, single point and horizontal, and they can be placed anywhere on the screen. Pinching and zooming makes the focus area larger or smaller. There's also the option to adjust the leveling of your image with a clever protractor control. The redesigned app takes these two tools, once mainstays of Instagram's photo editing interface, and hides them in the new wrench menu. Indeed, the entire interface has been nicely polished to a minimalist shine. Most users probably won't miss them, but long-time users might be annoyed at having to tap through the new menu to find them. One tool that did not get buried is the sunburst (or Lux) button, which quickly beautifies your images by pumping up the contrast and saturation. Tapping this now opens the Lux slider, giving you greater control over this handy tool.
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