For lunch I decided to stop at our nearby hibachi chicken place. This was the fortune in my cookie. Of course, I had to eat it.
I snapped the photo with my iPhone, and was surprise at how well it turned out. What really punched it up, though, was the application of a photo filter in Aviary.
Which brings us to the issue of Aviary and Picnic. For many years if you wanted to edit photos online in Flickr, Picnic was the way to go. It was offered as a menu option in Flickr, and had some basic editing and enhancement tools in the free version, and more filters and other editing tools in the paid filter.
Aviary, on the other hand, was an excellent suite of multimedia tools, encompassing music editing as well as image editing. It was pretty much browser-based, but stand-alone from other hosting options.
Then came Instagram, and everything changed. People got hooked on using vintage filters to quickly change photos from an expensive camera into something that looks like it was taken with a cheap camera. Effects that used to require Photoshop and some technical expertise could be replicated in seconds with Instagram’s filters. It seemed everyone wanted in on the action.