Instagram Turns 2

Theresa Stone

Millions of iPhone owners love using the Instagram app to enhance and share their phones’ photos. Now Burbn, the company behind the app, has introduced what it calls a “technology layer” that constitutes a “complete upgrade to Instagram’s camera”. The practical upshot of the change is that the app is much faster at applying filters — in fact, you can view a scene with a filter applied before you even snap a picture. (Do that and you may notice that there are four new filters in Instagram 2.0.) It’s also faster to get a tilt-shift effect with selective blurring.
I’m particularly impressed that Instagram 2.0 has coupled these speed improvements with an increase in image resolution. Photos shot with an iPhone 4 can now be as large as 1936 pixels by 1936 pixels. Dimensions of photos shot with an iPhone 3GS can now be as large as 1536 pixels square.
There are two other changes of note: You can rotate your photos within the camera, and you can forgo borders on a shot-by-shot basis.
Here’s a look at Instagram 2.0’s camera interface:

These are examples of the four new filters in action:

Like version 1, Instagram 2 is a free download from the App Store.