"Instagram - a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your photos with friends and family. Snap a picture, choose a filter to transform its look and feel, then post to Instagram.... it's as easy as pie. It's photo sharing, reinvented."
OK, now let's try that again, only this time make it accurate.
"Instagram - a fast, shit and fucking annoying way to piss people off by sending them shit photos. Snap a picture, fuck it up completely with some stupid-arse "filter", then post it... it's no easier than posting to any other image host, but it turns what might otherwise have been a good photo into a totally ruined piece of shit. It's photo sharing, fucked to the wide."
Instagram, hipstamatic, snapseed, all these other shite sites and "apps" that offer these cuntwank image transformation filters. No, they're not "fun". No, they're not "beautiful". No, they're not "quirky". They are FUCKING SHIT.
Applying some spastic-arsed cunt filter to a photo does NOT make it "better". It FUCKS IT UP. It makes it SHIT. OK, it might have been shit anyway... in which case, it makes it MORE SHIT. It's not "cool". It's not "arty". It's just plain ordinary SHIT.
Here's an example... This is a behind-the-scenes shot from the making of Lucy Pinder's 2013 Calendar. Sure, it's just a snap, it's not the sort of high quality pic the main photographer was taking. But it's perfectly OK for a snap...
But now look at what an appalling fuckup Instagram made of it...
See what I mean? It is shit. It's dim, it's blurred, it's fuzzy, it's unclear, it has a yellow tinge all over it, it looks like it was taken in a room full of steam, and it has a stupid fucking border round the edge to pretend it's a Polaroid photo, as if that's in any way a remotely desirable aim. It's FUCKED. Instagram has taken a half decent photo and made it into a piece of shit. For no fucking reason at all except that some unidentified idiot has been enough of a flaming great moron as to read that stupid shit off the instagram site which I quoted at the top of the page and actually believe it.
Why? Why the fuck would anyone believe anything written by a marketroid? Marketroids don't give a toss whether or not their product is a pile of shit. They just want people to use it so they can make money. That's all they care about. They don't care whether or not the world is a worse place as a result of people using their product, as long as it makes it a better place as judged by the numbers on their bank statement. So they tell any old shitty-arsed lie to make that happen, without a flicker of conscience. And plugging the deliberate ruination of potentially good photos as if it was the best thing since sliced bread is just such a shitty lie.
That's bad enough. But what makes it worse is that those lies are then read by people who don't have the first idea about how to fucking think. What the fuck is it with people who think that just because something's written down it has to be true? How the fuck can they not see that it's a load of bullshit even when the evidence is right in front of their eyes? It's obvious from the most cursory glance that the instagrammised version of the photo is fucking shit compared to the proper version. Nobody in their right mind could possibly think that a dim fuzzy blurred pic with wonky colour is better than a sharp clear realistically-coloured one. They'd have to be on some very strange drugs indeed. But they are either so fucking stupid, or so fucking hypnotised, or both, that they continue to believe the marketroids' stupid words even with the incontrovertible evidence of the fucked up photo right in front of their faces. And this is a species which tries to make out it's the most intelligent lifeform on the planet. Homo sapiens? Do me a fucking favour, homo maxime stultissimus is more like it.
And another thing about these shitarsed fucking filters is that they are destructive. They destroy data - the fucked up version of the pic contains less information than the original. Which means that reversing the upfucking is not merely difficult, it's mathematically impossible - trying to put the photo back to its original condition means trying to recreate information which simply isn't there any more, so it can't be done. Can try, but it only achieves a partial improvement, the end result is never as good as the original was.
Here's an example - this is another behind-the-scenes snap from the same shoot:
This is a bit shit, right? It's not sharp, it's particularly lacking in detail in the darker regions, and the colours are a bit iffy. Thing is... it could be one fuck of a lot worse. I spent several hours working on it, trying this that and the other experiment to try and get it looking half decent, then finally gave up and admitted that I couldn't beat the maths - especially since my colour vision was now fucked from staring at the screen so long and things looked a different colour every time I moved my eyes.
See this is what it started out as. I don't have the original. I just had to try and make the best I could out of this fucking horrific abortion of a fucked up piece of shit that diarrhoeaed out of Instagram's putrid filter arsehole...
I mean just what the fuck? Fucking instagram shit has turned Lucy bright red/orange so she looks like a fucking lobster. The background is a mucky blue/green/grey colour which looks as if the sofa is growing some sort of mould. And there is a dark smudge all round the edge of it as if it was taken on the kind of camera which is so shit even disposable cameras aren't that bad these days. If my restoration of it is anywhere near the truth it was probably quite a good photo originally... but the moronic splattered dog turd of a filter has totally fucking ruined it, and destroyed so much of the information in the process that reconstructing the original to a decent standard simply isn't possible and the best I can do is a half-arsed job which is still quite fucked.
Just what the juddering fuck possesses any supposedly rational human being to take what was originally a good photo, quite deliberately turn it into a horrific fucked-up mess... and then publish the fucked-up version instead of the original, as if shitting all over the photo somehow made it better? Whoever the fuck did that needs to be prevented from going anywhere near any kind of photographic apparatus or software until they've had the putrefying mess of pea soup taken out of their skull and a functional brain implanted in its place.
And moreover, whoever wrote the software that does that, and whoever is responsible for publishing and advertising it, all need to be transported to a desert island with no internet access and marooned there for the rest of their lives. And the desert island should be home to a dairy farm so they can spend that rest of their lives shovelling cowshit, because they're not fit for any more pleasant or intellectual duty.
Stupid fucking destructive cunts.
I will admit the existence of two complicating factors. But they do not count as mitigation, because they are both fucking stupid too.
The first is the shit excuses for monitors that people use these days - and the shit settings they come set on by default which nobody ever realises need to be changed. If you can, that is... a lot of the time "surface of Rigel" is the lowest colour temperature setting they come with. It simply isn't possible to turn the colour temperature down to a setting appropriate to a type G yellow dwarf. Blue supergiant is your only option.
I've just tried the experiment of looking at the above two photos using such an abortion of a display and it must be said that the fucked-up version does not look so badly fucked on it. It still does look fucked, though... and moreover it makes normal high-quality photos that have not been arsed around with also look fucked. Differently fucked, to be sure, but still indisputably fucked, with colours that are very obviously nothing like their real-world shades. So it should be bleeding obvious that the problem is the monitor, not the photo, and fucking the photo up isn't going to solve anything.
The other is that people in general have this idea that for some reason or other you're not supposed to complain when things are shit. At least, not complain to the people who are responsible. They seem to think that it is somehow better to tell those people they've done a great job to their face while grumbling in private behind their backs. Which, of course, means that the shit people merrily carry on doing shit things and the people on the receiving end of the shit things carry on being shat on. In other words... it's fucking stupid.
If people are stupid enough to think fucking photos up is a good idea in the first place they certainly aren't going to have the intellectual capacity to realise that it isn't of their own accord. They need to be told. They need to have it pointed out to them that they are doing a shit thing in sufficiently unambiguous terms that what minimal brain function they have to work with is capable of getting the message. Pretending their shit thing is not shit out of "politeness" doesn't help anyone, and doesn't achieve anything except to ensure that things carry on being shit.
People carry on posting photos fucked with instagram because nobody has the bollocks to say to them "that might be a good photo if you hadn't fucked it up with that stupid filter, please post the original instead". People only ever reply to gush over the shit and tell them how great it is. All they are achieving by this is to provide the instagram-using idiot with false and spurious confirmation of the marketroids' lies. The only people who benefit from this situation are the cunts who run instagram - who, as explained above, are cunts, and should be marooned on a desert island with no internet access so they are no longer able to con idiots into fucking stuff up. The very last thing they deserve is to be helped to continue to profit by making the world a shittier place.
So, to help make the world a less shitty place, please help spread the word - INSTAGRAM IS FUCKING SHITE, and anyone who thinks deliberately ruining photos is a good idea is a STUPID FUCKING CUNT.
It goes some way to restoring my faith in humanity to find that I am indeed far from alone in feeling this way about instagram. I've just found a blog post by a chap called Seldo, entitled Why I really, really hate instagram, making almost exactly the same points only with a bit less swearing. Rock on my son.