My first Instagram-generated image of my 9-year-old sister, Erika

In a world of curves, levels, and layers, no photograph remains invincible to the strokes of digital tweaks.

Adobe Photoshop, and countless similar photo editing software, up-to-par with it or not, has changed the way we create and consume what started out as a complex science of creating and presenting.

Digital photography, the precursor of the world’s most popular – and therefore most pirated – photo editing software, is now as much your call as it is Ansel Adams’ in his time. With tools getting cheaper and more advanced by the quarter, more and more people who started out as consumers like everybody else are becoming creators, using the term loosely, of course.

Whether the cheap consumer or the increasingly cheaper prosumer, cameras are becoming as ubiquitous as cellular phones. Taking photographs of previously mundane things – of your goo-lined early-morning face, your al-fresco breakfast on a Sunday, your newly painted nails – now occupy as much space in the diminutive SD card as annual reunions, graduations, and anniversaries.

Remember the dead, pray for the living, taken October 31, 2010

Blame it on Facebook, or its predecessor, Friendster, who have both turned us into social-media-attention-grabbers.

But then again there are also those who go the extra mile with what they create and let consume on their virtual territories.

And this is where software such as Photoscape comes to the scene. Downloadable over the web for free, Photoscape will surely capture the interest of the average Joe and Jane who snaps a lot and wants some punch in his/her photos but who care not about learning Photoshop. To put it simply, it’s like an idiot’s guide to the basics of photo editing. It does in one click pretty much what Photoshop users will do using a string of five commands. Take, for instance, the removal of the color cast. Photoscape has a dedicated ‘Remove color cast’ button for this purpose, whereas in Photoshop, you would need to either tweak the red and blue channels or overlay a photo filter, whatever suits your purpose best.

Besides, I must admit, Photoshop gets too complicated sometimes. When you process photos by the hundreds, you’d know what I mean. Sometimes, presets would make your life way easier.

Erika

And when you thought you already had the easy life with Photoscape, you discover Instagram – currently available as an app for iPod Touch and iPhone (not sure if there’s one for the iPad) for people who love the vintage lomo feel. This photo technique, after all, strikes you as more personal, not to mention out-of-the-ordinary. It converts otherwise badly focused, grainy, or plain crappy photos into something else – which leaves, I believe, more room for creativity for anyone who wants to add more into his or her everyday goo-lined early-morning-face photo. After using any of its 12 presets, your refurbished piece of artwork will be presented in a square-frame format similar to medium-format cameras the likes of million-peso cameras like Hasselblad currently produce. How’s that for, er, oomph factor?

I’ve tried Instagram yesterday and it’s so far working well for my ends. Except that you can’t seem to download any more presets – you’re stuck at 12, and after perhaps 10 or 20 photos, you’d wonder how your next photo will look with a little more darkness, grain, or green tinge. This is because its presets – keeping true to their name – can’t be tweaked, unlike those in Photoscape or in Lightroom. Just them twelve.

And because I’m using it with my second generation iPod Touch, I couldn’t take photos of my newly painted nails and goo-lined early-morning-face and have it on Instagram in seconds. I’ve tried syncing photos taken with my camera into it – a hassle, if I may say, no thanks to Apple’s ‘conservative’ system.

And Instagram is not like Flickr whose online presence thrives on a website. It does not. All a registered Instagram user can do from a desktop is to change personal settings, such as username, password, and gender.

Which gives me enough reason to want to sell my iPod Touch for the new fourth generation unit, unable as I am to shell out for an iPhone.