Like playing around with photographs on your Android? Although Instagram is now available on Android in all its Hipster glory, those in the know have been using Vignette, a feature-packed app that gives photos that familar lo-fi edge, to filter their images into moody, Facebook friendly snapshots for years.
With its own camera interface, Vignette offers basic camera settings as well as the opportunity to apply filters to images already stored on your phone. Once your image is loaded, you can perform a series of rudimentary editing functions, such as adjusting brightness, contrast and saturation, and also choose to crop or edit your image before the real fun starts. The sheer amount of effects available can be overwhelming at first? You can choose to apply a variety of filters to your image, from the eponymous Vignette and a stylish Portrait effect to Velvia? A personal favourite that creates vivid colours perfect for nature photography.
Other effects include a selection emulating the effects of various toy and vintage cameras, colour highlight settings that pick up accents of a selected colour within your image and a wonderful graduated ‘tobacco’ filter that creates jaw-dropping sunsets to put anything on Instagram to shame.
With over 50 different effects and filters, and countless options to adjust and customise those once they’re applied, Vignette is a really impressive piece of kit that makes it easy to while away hours turning everything from night-out mugshots to holiday snaps into genuinely interesting pieces of photography. And while the resulting images are never going to be professional-quality works of art, they’re different enough from the familiar Instagram images to convince more than a few people your photography skills are far greater than they actually are.
