Instagram is fast becoming my favourite place to plan trips. You’re never more than a few clicks away from discovering another stop on the bucket list.
Last weekend I tagged a few days onto a business trip to visit one of my Instagram crushes: The Saguaro Palm Springs. It’s not the spa, free bikes, pool or its reputation for food that attracted me to the hotel. No, it was the images of its rainbow painted exterior that had me hankering for a desert escape.
The graduated coloured walls are inspired by the briefly-lived desert flowers and were the brain child of hotel architects Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat. The colour-blocking around the pool makes for a visual feast from the moment you open your curtains in the morning.
The Instagrammable architecture doesn’t end there around every corner you find a coloured wall, hue-drenched brick-edge or graphic feature worked into the design. The rooms are no exception, from the orange bathroom to the yellow curtains on our window we were treated to a night of rainbow-dwelling.
The Saguaro is the perfect backdrop to test a new photo editing app dedicated to making the most of the colour in your images: A Color Story. Currently available on iOS from iTunes, the app is free but requires significant in app purchases to gain all of the filters on offer. It has been developed by blogging sisters Elsie and Emma of A Beautiful Mess who are known for their bright imagery and hashtag communities such as #ABMlifeiscolorful
With so many photo editing apps and Instagram’s own in-app editing getting stronger with each update do you really need to add another string to your bow? Yes, yes and yes again. If you love colour in your images you need A Color Story and here’s why.
Firstly Curves. Yes, this app has a well-stocked tool kit which includes curves making the process of phone editing swift for those of us used to traditional photo editing. Honestly, they could have stopped there and had an eminently marketable app but A Color Story goes further.
The filters are grouped into themes: Essentials, Blush, Chroma, Organic, Fresh, Airy, B&W, Boho, Deep & Vintage, which you can purchase individually or as a pack. Is it worth purchasing the filters? Yes, unlike other apps the choice of filters is strong and you will fall for more than just one or two favourites. Each theme has around eight filters which fit the mood of their set. When you apply a filter you have the option to dial it down and layering several filters can be done in app unlike many competitors.
Adding to their powerful editing features you can add effects: Flare & Bokeh, Light Leaks and Colour Fog, all deliver a variety of effects which can be moved, tilted, flipped and mirrored to enhance your photo with the whimsy of times past. All of your edits can be saved so you can develop your own look and apply it to future photos without having to remember each step.
A Color Story is the photo editing app colour lovers have been waiting for. It brightens and whitens without losing image quality. The colours in your image sing out and creating the vision you have in mind is a hop, skip and a jump away. We may not all have the luxury of the desert sunlight but we can bring it into our images with A Color Story.
Kat Molesworth
Kat Molesworth is a Photographer and lifelong camera enthusiast. She works for a range of commercial and private clients and teaches photography workshops in the UK.
Kat is also Director of Blogtacular, the conference for creative bloggers. You can find her on Instagram as@thatkat and she writes her personal blog at Housewife Confidential.