My favorite line when someone tells me my iPhone has taken a sub-par photograph? “Don’t worry, I’ll Instagram it.” Since it’s inception, Instagram’s loyal followers have grown from a whole lot of hipsters to 50 million users. With its recent sale to Facebook, Instagram secured its spot as an influential name in social networking.
Not a fan of sharing ironic, filtered photographs? Not a problem. Normalize is the anti-Instagram. According to its App Store description, Normalize “turns a photo back into what it is supposed to look like.” While I find Instagram photos aesthetically more pleasing than my ill cropped and poorly shot iPhone photography, I can see how one may enjoy a photo for the purpose of accurately capturing an image. The most interesting product of Normalize? Buzzfeed’s discovery of how well it works on updating a vintage photo (see Buzzfeed’s Andy Warhol reproduction). But updating a vintage photo is far less hip than making one from 2012 look like it is from 1970. Sorry Normalize.