Filters

The Promises—and Perils—of Ocean Desalination

As the world gets drier, do we need to turn to the ocean?

Super-Dry California Is Set to Approve a $140 Million Water Desalination Plant

The state is desperate for ways to alleviate its water crisis.

Nitecore’s BlowerBaby Is My New Favorite Photography Tool

It sends dust flying with a 44 MPH blast of air, and saves me a lot of cleanup work in Photoshop.

Ikea’s First Smart Air Purifier Comes Camouflaged as a Side Table

The Starkvind will help you breathe easier while also being easy on the eyes.

This Filter Is Really Good at Turning Seawater Into Freshwater

The electrospun nanofiber membrane filters out nearly all salt.

L’Oreal’s Digital Makeup Line Turned Me Into a Monster Unfit for Zoom Calls

Virtual makeup is not a particularly new use of augmented reality. There are plenty of those kinds of filters on Snapchat (remember that app?) and Instagram. Sephora also launched an AR mirror and app ages ago. But L’Oreal’s new series of filters is part of its first “digital makeup line,” the idea being that, during…

Snapchat: Yeah, Our Juneteenth Filter Asking Users to Smile to Break Chains Was a Bad Idea

Snapchat received widespread criticism Friday for its Juneteenth filter that prompted users to celebrate the anniversary of the end of slavery in the U.S. by smiling to break chains. By mid-day, Snap quietly pulled the tone-deaf filter and the company has since issued a public apology. Apparently, this Lens was a beta version that went…

Reporter Doesn’t Realize Facebook’s Filters Were Making His Live Weather Report Especially Awesome

The scourge of low-budget news broadcasts and impromptu live streams has reared its ugly head once again as a North Carolina TV reporter forgot to disable the wacky Facebook Live Mystery Mask augmented reality filters before going on air to report on some unusual snowfall in the area. WLOS ABC 13 anchor Justin Hinton had…

Accidental Kitty Cat Filter Undermines Pakistani Minister’s Serious Livestream

No, Shaukat Yousafzai is not a furry. The regional Pakistani minister just happened to be on the wrong (perhaps right?) end of a social media snafu. During a press briefing that was streamed on Facebook Live, an AR cat filter was left on, leaving Yousafzai with dainty pink ears, whiskers, and a bit of a…

Snapchat’s Viral Garbage Machine Strikes Again

Snapchat filters—love’em or hate’em, about once a year one goes viral, floods your timeline, and you think to yourself, “Oh yeah, Snapchat still exists.” This week, Snapchat’s gender swap filter exploded all over social media. You could hardly scroll through Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook without seeing gender-bent versions of your family, friends, ex-lovers, celebrities, coworkers,…

FaceApp Launches Digital Blackface Options Because the World Is Filled With Idiots [Updated]

This really isn’t that hard, people. Just last year, Snapchat apologized for adding an offensive Bob Marley selfie filter to its stable. Now, FaceApp—the silly photo editor you probably downloaded in March and totally forgot about—has outdone Snapchat by throwing in options for people to virtually switch between multiple races. No. Don’t do this. https://gizmodo.com/snapchat-s-offensive-bob-marley-filter-gives-you-inst-1772008981…

Snapchat’s Dumb New ‘World Lenses’ Feel Like Magic

Snapchat is about to get way more fucking adorable. The company just launched a major update today introducing its highly anticipated “World Lenses” feature, giving people the ability to drop digital 3D objects into real world scenes. Although the feature is undoubtedly augmented reality (AR), Snapchat curiously does not mention the phrase in its official…

Smog-Filtering Screens Will Make Our Polluted Future Slightly More Tolerable

As our newly-elected leaders do everything they can to roll back environmental regulations, the future is looking more and more like a smog-filled dystopia. But not all scientific progress has ground to a halt. Scientists at National University of Singapore have created a transparent smog-filtering window screen that could make our lives a little less…

A Promising New Method For Cleaning Up the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

Hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive water remain sitting around the site of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan. But scientists can’t simply dump the liquid into the ocean, and if it continues sitting around, it could seep into the soil. A team of scientists from Rice University in Texas and Kazan…

Clean Up Your Gmail Inbox Using Drag-and-Drop Filters

If you have the default inbox view in place on Gmail, you’ll see tab headers like Primary, Social, Updates, and Promotions across the top of your messages. By simply dragging and dropping messages between tabs, you can set up customized filters for your incoming emails and make sure Gmail gets smarter at sorting your messages…

Snapchat’s New Custom Geofilters Are the Dumbest Way to Waste $5

Snapchat has had the option for people to submit custom geofilters for a while, but until now they’ve been restricted to public places and neighbourhoods. Now, anyone with $5 to spare and no self-respect can get in on the action. In case you’ve lost your resident tween, let me explain what a geofilter is: if…

4 Filtered Photos That Will Cure Your Instagram Rut

Instagram filters really do make bad photos look better, but there’s more to the world of photography than Hudson and Lark. Here are four novel, filtered photos you submitted for this week’s Shooting Challenge. The results? Surprisingly tasteful. Winner: Ocean Moonrise I shot this photo Labor Day weekend as the moon rose over the Atlantic…

Shooting Challenge: The Craziest Filter You Can Find

You kids and your #nofilter tags. Everything’s filtered! The engineer who built your camera made dozens of decisions about color, lighting, and contrast processing. So for this week’s Shooting Challenge, let’s celebrate the filter. Nay, let’s full-out ROAST the filter. The Challenge Take a photograph and process it with the craziest filter(s) you can find…

Shooting Challenge: Negatives

Photographic negatives are like a peek into some hidden dimension. And for this week’s Shooting Challenge, we want you to photograph a negative. The Challenge Take a photo negative. And since most of you are shooting digital, it’s OK, you can fake it! The Technique A photo negative is really a color and contrast reversal.…

Move over, Valencia, you smug sepia-tinted ass clown. Instagram is releasing five new filters today—Slumber, Crema, Ludwig, Perpetua, and Aden—its first round of new vintagey camera effects since 2012.