There are plenty of quality photography apps available in the Windows Phone Store that offer basic or simple editing tools. Instablurrr hopes to join their ranks with a quick and easy way to add blurred out borders to your photographs.
There is really not much to this Windows Phone app, but it lays down a nice foundation to build upon. I cannot say Instablurrr is a photo app that you will use with regularity. However, it is not a bad option to have tucked away in your Windows Phone app library.
The interface with Instablurrr is not complicated. You have a series of control buttons at the bottom of the screen to view the about screen, rate the app and view the help screens. Beneath the three-dot menu, you will find options to send feedback to the developer, report a bug and check out other apps from the developer.
To start the editing process, just tap the lens on the main menu to open up your Windows Phone Pictures Hub. Currently, Instablurrr can only edit existing images on your Windows Phone and lacks the ability to capture new images to edit.
Once you have chosen an image, the image will be cropped to a 1:1 ratio with blurred sections added to either the top/bottom or sides of the picture. The orientation of the blurring is dependent on the orientation of the original image. Landscape images will have the blurring at the top and bottom while portrait images will have the blurring to the left and right.
Editing adjustments are limited to moving the un-blurred portion of the image and adjusting how much blur is applied to the image. Should you need to re-center the un-blurred portion, just double tap the image.
Once you have everything set, you can save the image locally or share the image through the Windows Phone universal share option. Edited images are saved at a resolution of 1688 x 1688 at 150dpi.
Overall Impression
Instablurrr is a specialized Windows Phone photography app that applies a 1:1 crop and blurred borders to your images. While the app does a nice job of things, it may be too specialized to have across the board appeal. While it may be a niche app, I think the app could be more attractive with a little fine-tuning.
There's a lot of automation in Instablurrr's editing, which makes it handy for quick edits, but some users will prefer to do things on their own.For starters, I would like to have the ability to crop the image to the 1:1 ratio manually and choose whether the blurring is along the top and bottom or sides of the image. I would not also mind having the option to adjust the width of the blurred sections as well. Lastly, there were a few instances where the app crashed while opening an image to edit. The instability was not that frequent but noticeable.
Overall Instablurrr is a nice Windows Phone photography app. It is not going to be an everyday app you will find yourself using but the effects will draw the focus of your pictures more towards the subject. Instablurrr is a free, ad-free Windows Phone app and a handy editing app to have in your Windows Phone app library.
Download Instablurrr for Windows Phone (Free)
