Instagram Adds Post Notifications For Specific Accounts, Color And Fade Tools

Instagram has a couple of new photo editing tools available in its mobile applications, out today on Android and coming soon to iOS: Color and Fade. Color lets you adjust the tone of both the highlights and shadows of your pics, adding a different cast to light for moody effects. Fade lets you wash out colors altogether, getting a more muted effect reminiscent of low-fi prints, with variable intensity

The updates are like the more detail-oriented adjustments Instagram began making available to app users above and beyond its set filters last year, providing more granularity for those looking to add variety to their picture tweaks. Off the shelf filters are still there of course, offering a shortcut to more interesting looking pics, but Color and Fade join perspective adjust, Lux, and other specific shadow, exposure, highlight and tilt shift controls to give you individualist creative freedom, which is a smart way for Instagram to keep things interesting for users gaining more familiarity with photo editing basics while retaining their broad market appeal.

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Instagram is also adding Post Notifications to its app, letting you receive push notifications when your favourite accounts post new updates. This is a welcome feature that should make it easier to get alerted when stuff you really care about lands on the network, especially as follow counts rise. It’s also a great feature for the upcoming Apple Watch app, which makes the timing likely not coincidental – imagine receiving a notification on your wrist when a spouse or family member posts a new pic, letting you check it out instantly without even taking your phone out of your pocket.

Post Notifications are available to Instagram users on both iOS and Android as of today.