A Visual History of the Instagram Filter
There’s a twist at the end
Late 2000’s smartphones made crappy photographs. There weren’t many editing apps around to improve the way they looked, and when Instagram launched in 2010 its filters were a response to this problem.
They were not subtle, and that was the point; Instagram wanted the pictures on its platform to look like they’d been altered. Applying a filter like Apollo, Nashville or 1977 turned a regular old photograph into an “Instagram.”
Smartphone camera quality steadily improved and by 2014, when the company released a suite of sophisticated editing tools that allowed for microscopic adjustments to photos, it seemed like the days of heavy-handed filters were over. Capturing something that required #nofilter was something like a badge of honor. All of this must have been fine with the company — by then any photograph on the platform was already an “Instagram,” no matter what kind of editing was applied.
Yet somewhere around 2018, filters were resurrected. Today it’s common for influencers to use their own custom filters — called presets— that they create themselves in Adobe Lightroom. The idea behind the presets is to wash each photo in the same on-brand tone.
The twist is that presets don’t stop with influencers themselves. Many turn around and sell their presets to followers who want to achieve the same look for somewhere between $19 and $150.
So, Instagram started out by offering free filters that prettified crappy mobile photos, but once “camera phone” technology evolved so much that anyone could get crisp, clear pictures, the original use of filters became obsolete and paid filters were born — so that Instagrammers could set their pictures apart by… making them all look the same.
Follow me on Instagram @Kate8 to see this piece — and more like it— as a story! These essays kind of suit the IG story format perfectly. It’s very… meta.
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