How To: Boost The Colors In Your Facebook Photos & Make Them Pop

A Facebook page is a place for us to paint our fairy tales. The feed is a personally constructed cyber-memory that runs parallel to the fading images that we have in our heads. We all have the opportunity to build a social media-housed, photo-enhanced personal narrative that we share with the world, so why not make it unreal and step up the vacation photos of the almost-crystal blue waves that gently remind us of faraway lands and the stuff we read about in poems?

I can help with that. Welcome to my iPhone.

People always ask me why my pictures on Facebook look different, like my photo-feed was manufactured in ‘Toon Town.’ I’m clearly not a professional photographer, but I am an iPhone photo-app geek. Almost every app I own is camera-related and downloaded for the purpose of giving my photo memories a facelift. I don’t simply shoot and upload my photos au natural. I prefer to decorate my timeline with mightier, brighter versions of what I saw (or what I wish I’d seen). I’d rather remember good times tinted in unnatural pinks and tweaked to match the blinding shininess you only see on foil candy wrappers.

We are after all, building our own narratives along a timeline in a digital world. The photos we share provide the backdrop for the persona we create and the story we’d like to tell. Perhaps this e-persona is effortlessly saving the planet whist quoting Buddha and splashing in an electric green pool under a neon sunset. It’s the Internet baby, so the cyber-sky’s the limit.

I’ve honestly never met a filtered photo I didn’t like, and this obsession goes way beyond Instagram. Let’s call it a passion for “hyper-photography,” for crafting the hyperreal memory from a replicant photo that is “more real than real.”

I’d like to share the simplest photo app tip with you here so you too can tweak your memories and pimp your feed. And it’s as easy as a quick scenic nip and a slight HDR tuck on the Camera+ app (this even works to lighten dark photos). Just upload your photo to Camera+ (or photograph from the app), change your scene to “clarity,” give the pic a little f/x goosing via “HDR,” and voila! You’re now working with some tricked out cosmetic memories on Facebook. Try it. Boost the color in your Facebook photos and make ’em pop!