There isn’t a photo in the world a good filter can’t fix – and you don’t need to be a pro at Photoshop for it either! For every blotchy skin day, X-PRO II works better than concealer and even that unfocused shot taken hastily at a concert can be made to look ‘artsy’ with a little bit of tweaking.

After all, what’s the point of a smartphone, with its marvellous megapixel camera and the countless apps that can be downloaded, if not to share everything from blurry selfies to scenic views?

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and when you consider that Instagram users upload an average of 60 million photos a day, one could say it is quite an ‘eloquent’ app.

But if you’ve ever wondered just how this obsession with filters and saturations, red-eye removal and adjusting warmth or saturation has affected our culture of compulsive photo-taking (and sharing), then you’re in good company.

Yahoo Labs commissioned a research paper titled “Why we filter our photos and how it impacts engagement”, a study that combines large-scale date analysis along with detailed interviews. This study worked with Flickr users, interviewing 15 users and studying over 7.6 million photos.

Focusing on two main points – the producers who create these photographs using filters and the consumers who view, and then like or comment on, a filtered photograph, the study attempts to understand “the motivations behind filter use and their impact on user engagement”. It is basically an attempt to figure out why we tend to prefer a picture in black-and-white over its colour original, or why a vintage filter that ages a photograph is more appealing than its untouched original.

Like or not to like The study found two groups among users of Flickr - first, the ‘serious hobbyist’ who uses filters only to correct errors and second the ‘casual photographer’ who use filters to make images more “unique and fun”.

As much as you would like to think we’re all serious hobbyists, lets admit that we all do use filters to make an average picture beautiful. After all, who doesn’t want more likes?

In the social media world, your worth is measured – to be brutally honest – in the number of likes you get, especially when it comes to photo-sharing apps and websites like Instagram and Flickr. The study finds that the use of filters correlate strongly to the number of views, and they even quantified it – there is a 21 per cent increase in chance of a photo being viewed if filters are used.

Commenting, however, being a more “social type of engagement”, trends indicate that users with a larger number of followers have more comments.

However, photos that feature filters receive 45 per cent more comments than original ones.

Warmer the better This is all very well, but if you’re wondering what kind of filters work better than others, this study claims that the key is in certain factors like warmth and saturation.

Filters that increase contrasts, like black and white ones, filters that increase exposure and warmth and even ones that create an aging effect, all impact engagement positively. The key finding of the study is that filters that auto-enhance a photo, or make it look better more naturally, find more engagement than ones that create exaggerated effects – the only exception being filters that make photos look antique.

The study confirms what we have always subconsciously known – and used to our advantage – that filtered photos have a higher rate of engagement, and this refers especially to filters that heighten warmth, contrast and exposure. Hence, warmer the filter, the more likely it is to appeal to a viewer, be clicked on and liked.

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