

Show HN: Shift – Photo filters designed by you - gregalbritton
http://shiftbypixite.com

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olla
Will it also be available for android any time in the future?

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gregalbritton
Yes it will be in the near future :)

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purans
That's pretty cool. Waiting for android

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hnriot
Does the world really need more photo filter apps?

In nearly every case, and in all of the examples, these filters have degraded
the images substantially. I guess some people might find these fun, but don't
we already have enough photo filter apps?

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sp332
It's not for merely reproducing what's in front of the camera. It's an
artistic tool for producing emotional effects.

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hnriot
Please! Seriously.

what you're describing isn't photography, but graphic design. That's fine, and
of course people are free to corrupt their images as much as they want, but we
really don't need another app for this, there are already hundreds of them and
they all do the same stuff.

As for the OP suggesting these are works of art, yeah right.

These move photography away from being an accepted form of art, not towards
it, these filter apps take photography more and more into the world of cheap
throw-away effects. There's nothing new here, nothing that creates any real
artistic value, it's just pixel pollution.

Along with t clarity slider in LR these apps are doing so much harm to the
reputation of photography in the art world.

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sp332
Good, reputation is overrated. I mean you don't punctuate or capitalize
properly, and you don't worry about someone berating you for not maintaining
the reputation of the written word as a serious medium for expression.

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hnriot
You're going there, you're criticizing my punctuation and capitalization
skills???

As for your point, it makes no sense. I mean, it sounds fine, and it reads
just perfectly, the capitalization and punctuation is almost spot on, but
there's no substance to it. I don't worry what others think, that would be as
dumb as another photo filter app. The written word will manage just fine long
after we're both pushing up daisies.

I think you might have been trying to make some kind of snide remark comparing
the written word's reputation to the plight that photograph has taken in
recent years. That might be something that would be interesting to talk about.
Twitter has done to the written word much the same that Instagram (et al) has
for photography. There's a lexicon all to twitter, it has its own vocabulary,
it's own grammar and so on. Anyone, like me, who does machine learning using
twitter is painfully aware of how the authors of twitter have degraded and
abused the language as a "serious medium for expression.", Photo filter apps
have done the same for photography making it harder for actual photographers
to be taken seriously in the art world.

Actually, I think I read too much into what you wrote, I think it just didn't
say much of anything at all, just a pretentious attempt at an insult. Let me
guess, a liberal arts major :)

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sp332
No, it's not an insult. I just think it's crazy that anyone sits around
fretting about the artistic merits of Instagram photos. I don't see how one
person's crummy photo has any bearing on someone else's seriously good photo.
You or I can type any gibberish into a text box on the internet, and it has
just as much right to exist there as anything else. And it doesn't affect how
good anyone else's writing is. So no one worries about it, and I don't see why
anyone worries about crummy photos either.

I have a BA in CS :)

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hnriot
Fair enough, we don't agree but this is a free country after all. And besides,
who cares what either of us think about this point, history will decide.
Photography is definitely morphing into something new with technology playing
a larger role over time. The written word on the internet isn't really a good
analogy, a better one would be software that takes the written word and
embellishes it with similes and metaphors generated from HMM algorithms, or
rewriting adjectives with embellished phrases for you, or converting it to
iambic pentameter. These are the literary metaphors of photo filters. Can you
imagine picking up a copy of Gravity's Rainbow and having to chose between the
Ludwig, Aden or Mayfair filter. One has Slothrop not rescue Katje from the
octopus. That's what these photo filter apps are doing to photography. Maybe
people don't care, maybe there's layers to photography and there's no spill
between them, like you say, maybe these layers are isolated from one another.
I like it when the name changes so we don't call them photo filters but
something more lomo to show it's not meant to be photography. If he were dead,
Jeff Wall would be rolling in his grave.

