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Which mobile applications can be called "necessary for installation"? In addition to WeChat, QQ, Alipay and other national products, perhaps only the nomination "filter" will not be too controversial. A lot of data shows that "filter" products have a very scary penetration rate. For example, the Research Report on Photography and Beautifying Industry released by Aurora in 2019 shows that 4 out of every 10 mobile Internet users have photography and beautifying apps installed in their mobile phones.
However, this seems to be the peak of filter products. Today, the overall filter market has begun to shrink significantly, both in terms of the volume of users of the product and in terms of user activity.
Take the filter market benchmark brand "Meitu" as an example. According to the financial report of Meitu Company in 2020, in terms of traditional business represented by Meitu Xiuxiu, the number of monthly active users of Meitu's products worldwide was 260 million, down 7.6% year on year, and the growth of products selling beauty selfies was weak.
The product is facing a severe market environment, and the "use of beauty" behavior itself is also being stigmatized - from the "Jobilo incident" two years ago to this year's "let me go", the formula "beauty=online celebrity pathological aesthetic" has become the consensus of netizens in the form of hindrance, "online celebrity died in the map", "how unreliable the beauty filter", "turn off beauty to try" "Your mother doesn't know you." "The four Asian magic arts: Thai Transfiguration, Korean Plastic Surgery, Japanese Makeup, Chinese Painting Repair," "Zhao Che" and other jokes appear almost "sinfully" in all places where there may be traces of beauty.
(The reserved program of A giao live broadcast: turn off the filter!) But is filter really no longer a good business? It seems hard to give a positive answer. On the one hand, as a functional module, the filter has become a standard configuration for short video and live broadcast, which is enough to show that the filter is a constant demand of users, including dithering, and fast hands who periodically launch streaming tasks with the theme of "filter" and "special effects", which is almost equivalent to telling you directly: "filter" It is also the most popular way to play, not only without "traffic anxiety", but also as a "traffic portal".
On the other hand, entrepreneurs did not refuse the filter. Taking the recently popular film machine APP as an example, with the film photos of star idols such as "Zhang Zifeng Film" and "Yi Close Qianxi Film" successively appearing on Weibo, the number of readers of # Tan Songyun's film style photo # reached 100 million, which triggered 37000 people to discuss, and people began to praise HUJI NOMO, VSCO and a series of filter products known as "niche", "small and beautiful".
You see, the "filter" is still talking about the future.
A Brief History of Filters: Shooting a Future
"Filter", which has become a daily term, was originally a professional term in photography. Before the rise of digital and mobile photography, filters, as camera accessories, were a kind of lenses with physical properties composed of filters that could be inserted into the optical path. The filter is installed on the camera for color correction, color conversion (or light balance), color separation or reduction, affecting reflection or suppressing glare, adjusting red and ultraviolet rays, etc.
(The ancient filter is the source of knowledge that needs to be cultivated with books: Confucius) Search "What is a filter" on the "Pacific IT Encyclopedia", and there are 31 answers, corresponding to different types of filters, such as UVs, skylight mirrors, red mirrors, fluorescent mirrors, etc., with different grades and different manufacturing materials. They adapt to different shooting areas, shooting weather, shooting themes, and have various requirements for exposure, The final color and light effect are quite different.
Obviously, the early filters were more exclusive to professional photographers, and only photographers who were proficient in both camera and shooting could be proficient in the selection and use of filters.
The physical property of "filter" is broken from PS, and the physical hardware is changed into computer software.
"Adobe Photoshop" was just a program written by a student to solve the image display problem of Apple computer in 1987 when it took shape. His brother who worked in the film special effects company was very interested in it. They spent more than a year together to continuously modify it into a more powerful image editing program, which digitized the filter, So that image processing can be completed on the computer, and finally sold to Adobe, becoming widely known.
The epoch-making influence of PS is also obvious in China. With the occurrence of a series of landmark events, as long as it is related to picture editing, it will be collectively referred to as "P Diagram" - that is, the use of Photoshop software is not necessarily, even if it is not necessarily the use of software to repair pictures, even if it is young people who understand technology——
In "Suite · My 2008" in the stupid dad series, "The South China tiger photographer Zhou Zhenglong" was matched with the words: "Although I am an illiterate old farmer, my PS technology is awesome".
In fact, according to the investigation report of the police, Zhou Zhenglong's "fake tiger" was created by cutting and pasting tiger New Year pictures, which has nothing to do with Photoshop (PS) technology.
P Chart has also created the Internet culture that many old netizens are fond of talking about, such as "Xinchun got immortality". More than ten years ago, when the post bar and the cat flutter started to spread crazily, this stalk was limited to words. Later, it had a passionate collision with the culture of the imperial bar, which had produced the "Great Emperor's Quotations". The words began to materialize into P Jesus. The "Spring Brother" with a halo on his head and wearing a plain robe began to emerge smoothly, and the subsequent "Beyond Body Protection" facial expression package was easily crushed with enthusiasm.
Of course, this event is a bit of a cyber storm now, and the later popular "Lin Yu" is essentially Internet dross (even with a certain deconstruction color), but the positive significance is that people have seen the charm of P through "Spring Brother", and continue to praise "Xiao Pang", "Director Jin" and "Jacky Cheung", Part of it has also been transformed into the enthusiasm of P chart learning, and a large number of P chart celebrities similar to "Yijie P husband" have been born. After that, "Don't put photos on the Internet" became a reserved program for marketing numbers to collect stories and scrape traffic.
(Now you can still see the traces of the past in Hupu Pedestrian Street) PS has become a typical symbol of subculture and entered the daily context of the public. At the beginning, the meaning of graphic editing software was deconstructed. As a result, the enlightenment of drawing revision and subculture derivatives it brought continued to permeate popular culture.
Although PS software can help people post process photos taken by digital cameras, the high learning costs and use costs behind its complex operations still deter many people, and digital filters fail to reach the public through PS.
Its true popularity will not come until the launch of Instagram in 2010. This image social software has transformed the concept of "filter" into "physical hardware - computer software - mobile client function", simplified complexity, and become a familiar and skilled image processing tool.
Ins designed several basic filters at the beginning of its creation, and then continuously updated and supplemented them. These filters have brought Ins a large number of users, and they have quickly become popular after being launched. Within two months, there were 1 million registered users. As of May 2019, Instagram had 1 billion users. Kevin Systrom, one of the founders of the company, explained Instagram's product concept in an interview with the Daily Telegraph: "In order to make mobile photography faster, more beautiful and more interesting, we learned from experience that taking photos on mobile phones does not bring us the results we want, so we created filters to get a more artistic experience."
Kevin Systrom even called them magic combinations, thinking that filters helped Ins achieve great success in the early days. The fixed expression of "Ins style" in China reflects its international influence, which was later used for reference and imitation by China's Meitu APP.
(In 2016, pregnant AB Paimeitu completed its listing) In February 2011, Ins was launched less than a year ago, and the first filter app in China, "Meitu Xiuxiu", was officially launched, focusing on the Meitu face repair function, marking the germination of domestic mobile phone filter products. Two years later, "Butter Camera" was launched, focusing on filters with fresh literary style and editing of characteristic fonts. At the beginning, it tried to form a different position from Meitu Xiuxiu, and China's mobile phone filter market became increasingly active.
Important nodes took place around 2016, with the latecomers one after another. Every time, there was a boom. The camera logo on the lower right corner of users was also changing. Faceu was launched in September 2015, and Wutai Camera was launched in December 2015. B612 Kaji from South Korea also caused repercussions in China around this time. They are very different from the early beauty cameras in terms of technical level, aesthetic characteristics, user interaction, etc. The beauty camera products are dated.
The first generation beauty camera has no high-tech such as face recognition and real-time beauty, and lacks the video beauty function. The first mobile client of Meitu Xiuxiu was the directly transplanted web technology, and the image repair function and filter menu are relatively simple. In terms of aesthetic characteristics, the first generation beauty camera has obvious cosmetic traces, and the personalized and refined design is limited, which highlights the powerful beautification effect. In terms of user interaction, it is mainly the one-way static output of the product side, and the real-time interaction with users is very weak. Different from the first generation of beauty cameras, the new cameras launched around 16 years ago used AI face recognition, AR, 3D animation and other technologies to capture the face in real time, and added special effects such as cute dynamic stickers, multi face beauty, and facial expression package GIF to cater to the changing aesthetic trend. They also seized the short video and live broadcast outlets on mobile terminals, developed the function of real-time video beauty, and enhanced the interest and interaction.
The result of the impact is that the mobile phone filter market begins to roll in, and the anxiety of the first movers is hard to hide. Wu Xinhong, the founder of Meitu Xiuxiu, said in an interview that "Meitu is afraid of being subverted, so we always think that it is better to subvert ourselves than to be subverted by others". This is indeed a consensus. With the change of aesthetic trends and user needs, the head companies are constantly changing their products.
In 2015, Meitu launched its "fashion selfie" featuring high level, which is in sharp contrast to a generation of filters featuring beauty and facial repair; After "Faceu Sprout", the facial team launched the "Light Face" APP in 2018, which has been ranking first in the application market only two months after its launch. It focuses on different styles of makeup filters, and fits in with the festive atmosphere of Halloween, Christmas and Spring Festival. It launched a limited version of makeup filters, and the slogan has also changed from "perfect face" and "goddess face" to "advanced face", From the original emphasis on "one touch beauty" to highlight "nature is not fake".
The face of the mobile phone filter is becoming more and more diverse, rather than just a slightly exaggerated beauty repair at the beginning. Under the scroll, it is becoming more and more difficult to lead the trend, but the pursuit of "advanced" has never stopped. Against this background, the film camera APP and the film wind filter came on stage.
In fact, in the years when Ins led the filter out of the circle, there was the image of the film machine filter mentioned at the beginning. The representative product is "VSCO Cam". In 2012, Visual Supply Co, a company specializing in developing color plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom to simulate real film, officially launched the first generation VSCO Cam in the Apple App Store. It was first remembered and loved by many users because of its fading effect.
However, the value of the film machine filter APP has not yet emerged. At least in China, film is still a professional and niche field, and "playing with film" has also been used as a standard configuration for composition. On a photography forum, there was a "Complete Guide to Film Loading Necessary for Cultural and Green People". The posting time was in 2013, and the number of visitors exceeded 3000. It refers to the film shot by the film SLR, which has nothing to do with the mobile phone film filter APP. The traditional filter products represented by Meitu Xiuxiu are still in the honeymoon period.
Film has different value?
The popularity of film camera APP in China has been around 17 and 18 years. In the past two years, representative film filter APP has been launched successively, such as early HUJI and Gudak, which were launched in September and June 2017 respectively. Now, NOMO Film camera apps such as FIMO and DAZZ were also launched in 18 years, with the download volume rising steadily, leading the Apple App Store, and then gradually launched payment. During this period, the use of film filters and evaluation courses are common on the Internet, which to some extent reflects the enthusiasm of users.
(This mainstream film machine APP source: Chuangqi Technology)
These apps have different descriptions in the app store, but "real film" and "retro" are their common signs. The difference between them and general mobile filter products is that most of their filters are from classic cameras or films in history. They not only simulate their image style in terms of color tone and granularity, but also simulate their body and operation.
For example, the inspiration of NOMO's "Happiness" filter came from the Happiness - 1 camera. This camera came from 1956. Tianjin Camera Factory trial produced the Happiness - 1 camera with a simple structure based on Germany's Altissa camera. NOMO simulated the iron body and image style of this camera.
As mentioned above, the complicated operation of the short board has delayed the digital filter to reach the public. The real film machine has been "controlled" by professional photographers and Wenqing for a long time. This is also the reason why there is no popularity. In addition, there is also the factor of shooting cost.
Photographer Xiaoyuan graduated from college last year and started to contact with SLR cameras as a sophomore. Canon and Nikon have played with SLR cameras, as well as domestic Phoenix and Seagull film cameras. She is also a pioneer in photography apps. As long as a new photography app is launched in the app store, Xiaoyuan will actively learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the product, and will pay to buy and recommend to friends when meeting a favorite filter.
Xiaoyuan said: "The real film machine is difficult to operate for novice photography Xiaobai. It requires manual focusing and parameter adjustment, and you can't see the film immediately. There are about 30 films in a roll, and you must take one roll of film before taking it out for development. Then you can go to the photo studio to scan it before you see the film, or use it for subsequent revision. Film is still very expensive. A roll of ordinary 160 film will also sell for ￥ 36 on the market. If it is good, it will exceed ￥ 50. The film production rate of ordinary people using film machines is about 18%, and the waste film rate is very high, which will cost a lot. "
But people seem to have a natural preference for photos with film texture. Even with all the problems mentioned above, film and film machine still have appeal.
Someone in Zhihu asked why the color of the film machine looks so comfortable. First of all, the answer is that the films produced by the old film factory are all the research achievements of the craftsmen for more than half a century. Both the color and the sensitivity and other parameters have fully considered the artistry and marketability. Of course, the film filter made in this way looks comfortable.
There is another saying that film is a kind of visual memory, which is seen by the older generation and also the childhood memory of many young people. This visual imprint makes film have a unique appeal. Of course, many people think that film is nothing more than a kind of feeling, and they despise the "film without brains". They think that film and digital have their own advantages and disadvantages, and should not blindly pursue film.
Perhaps a more comprehensive statement of this phenomenon is that people seem to have a natural preference for "retro". "Fashion is a circle" has become the consensus of people inside and outside the fashion circle. Today, fashion and single items that have been popular for decades have become fashion favorites, such as "large intestine hair circle", "shark clip" and "overalls". People who do not know it think it is a new thing. People who know it will naturally come to their own mind and look down on the ignorant.
(The hair circle of large intestine decades ago caused a hot topic on microblog) Film and film machine are old things. If fashion is a circle, film may also usher in its second heyday.
The popularity of "film camera APP" shows this trend. Slogans such as "simulating real film", "saving waste film" and "retro texture" are enough to break people's concerns about the operation and economic threshold of the film machine, to fulfill people's film fantasy and meet people's film aesthetic needs.
If Ins leads the filter to the public, the film camera APP is leading the film to the public.
This is not a bad thing - more people love and practice film photography, and people with a heart may really start to pay attention to the film niche market, buy film machines, and contact the real film.
Is it the middle or the end of the filter?
From the publicly available data, the popular film camera apps at home and abroad, such as NOMO, FIMO, Dazz, are almost original products of independent companies or individuals, rather than the sub products incubated within the head companies, but their influence has spread to the head players.
Beauty camera APP has launched films and retro filters in succession, and displayed them in a prominent position of the filter options, and even launched film camera single products separately, such as Meitu Xiuxiu's "Chaozi" launched "film camera" in 2018; The butter camera was launched in 2019 with the "Nichi" application, focusing on retro films, which reflects the real influence of this film filter craze. It is no longer a forced prop of cultural and green clothing that was ridiculed ten years ago, but only stays in the dark side of "costume" and "affectation", but comes to the bright side to try to attract more consumers.
Even "Instagram", the pioneer of mobile phone filters, has met a strong film enemy - the film camera app "Dispo", which was launched in December 2019 without filters, without P images, and only became a film in 24 hours, was founded by David Dobrick, a YouTube celebrity. According to Geek Park, at the end of February this year, anti routine Dispo not only firmly occupied the top 10 of the APP Store photography category ranking list, but also was popular with Silicon Valley capital, obtaining a round A financing of 20 million dollars. Sequoia, A16Z and other old brand capitals are investors. Today, there are 3 million users of Dispo with an estimated value of $200 million, and the number of downloads in the first month of its launch has exceeded one million. Dispo is titled as "anti instagram" because it advocates no beautification of photos.
(Operation interface of Dispo) Although it is the latecomer of the filter market, the film camera APP occupies the upper circle of the filter disdain chain. Film filters emphasize the sense of graininess and uniqueness, which is different from the stereotyped Internet celebrity aesthetic under the beauty filter. In short, it is relatively more authentic, without the original sin of pathological aesthetics. Many film masters, works and film manufacturers have blessed it, such as Love Letter, Rome, Wong Kar wai and Fuji, each of which is famous, This also makes "film" the best choice for high-end transformation of the mobile phone filter market.
Moreover, lenses, filters, makeup, stickers, essays, and even color puzzles of four and nine squares have been taken over by corresponding filter products. Whether pioneers or latecomers, the space for "leading the new trend" has been greatly reduced. Compared with comprehensive innovation, the retro "rejuvenation" is not a way of overturning against the wind and saving the country in a curved way, and film and film cameras are ready A huge library of classic materials.
It seems that the filter market has been stirred by such a small product, ushering in a transition?
In reality, the film camera APP may not be so powerful.
One major reason is that the "technical volume" has spread to the filter market, and the film camera APP may be difficult to break through. AI、 Algorithms, AR and other technologies enable impossible events such as "rejuvenation", "face changing", "instant transformation" and "quadratic transformation" to be realized through filters, increasing the interest and diversity of mobile phone filters. Big companies such as Meitu and Diaoyin all have specialized institutions similar to deep learning laboratories to develop filter technology, attract users, channel the platform, and facilitate advertising business.
However, for small film cameras, it is difficult for the capital market to make big moves, and the technology driven strategy of spending money may be unrealistic.
Taking the representative product "NOMO", which started in China, as an example, the financing process on "Tianyancha" shows that it obtained the angel round financing of millions of RMB on March 13, 2015, and then got the Pre-A round financing three months later. The transaction amount was not disclosed. The latest financing dynamics remain in 2015, and it has not yet entered the A round of financing, which is in the buffer stage before a round of financing.
In contrast, Faceu Jimeng Camera has completed 50 million rounds of C financing in October 2017, and was acquired by Byte Beat at a high price of 300 million dollars in 2018. It can be seen that the domestic capital market does not overestimate the film camera products, or the film camera products are not ready to join hands with the capital, and the sophisticated, large and strong route seems to be impractical.
Film camera APP also often does not have third-party advertising placement, and paying users are still an important pillar of their survival and development. Many filters in the film camera APP are exclusive to members. The annual membership fee is about the same as that of "Aiyouteng" video, even higher in some cases. The price of the filter is the same as that of the video member, but for ordinary people, the sense of obtaining the member film filter is not as good as the pleasure of enjoying the exclusive film and television variety show. It is doubtful how many people are willing to pay to use it.
There is no exact public data on the number of paying users of film camera APP, but it can be determined that there are more than one way to avoid payment. There is a huge demand for not paying or paying less. Countermeasures such as "free cracking version", "Taobao a few dollars", "compatible with three devices, find someone to AA together" are very common on the Internet.
(Douban NOMO group prohibits members from buying together in the specified form)
(Comments under Zhihu VSCO film filter tutorial) Under such circumstances, the possibility of the small and beautiful film camera APP to truly reverse the trend of the filter market is extremely small.
In addition, one of the public enemies of disdain for the chain is "inflation" - under the pressure of survival, the niche culture usually coexists with the mainstream market through "compromise" - specifically, a product that goes on the market and operates, which means that the track switching and the increase of substitutability, and the probability of film machine APP can not be exempt from customs.
"How is the film filter abused?" "Is it necessary to buy a film machine today when the film filter map editing APP is flooded?" The question has been frequently raised in recent years on Zhihu. "Overflow" is really the feeling of many people who are serious about film photography. After all, film camera APP can shoot the effect not inferior to the real film machine, and even "more film than film". The skills that professional photographers can teach before can now be taught by themselves or find a popular online course to meet the basic needs. "Overflow" is also natural and inevitable.
It is not strange or scary for a small audience to become the public. For the film camera APP, although it cannot dominate in the technical volume and the paying users also lack security, as long as the "cheese" of the emotional audience composed of loyal users and film lovers is not moved, it can still thrive in a small and beautiful blueprint. Terrible: it moved.
Part of it is its own reason, involving system bugs and membership services. The former can solve system problems such as flash back, incompatibility, vibration and sound through bug repair and version upgrade, and continuously improve the user experience, but the membership service directly moves the "cheese" of users. Consumers are full of complaints about the price increase of members, the failure to fulfill the filter update commitment to members, and the collection of money without trial opportunities. Some film camera APPs that have been out of circulation earlier are now branded as "ugly to eat".
Another part is environmental reasons. It has moved the "cheese" of professional film photographers in a passive way. Film photography is released to the public through the film camera APP, which is a good thing that most APP designers are happy to see. At the initial stage, it does not prevent professional film photographers from living in peace, even if there is criticism. The chief designer of Ins basic filters was disappointed by the proliferation of filters: "It seems that the whole world will do these things overnight". He refused to use the filters designed by himself, but both Ins and mobile phone filters are still popular. The same is true of the film camera APP. Some professional film photographers also expressed a negative attitude towards its appearance, but the film filter was still on fire, and became a hot business for mobile photography.
However, when more and more people regard the "color deviation", "overexposure" and other defects of film photography as the standard of film, professionals can't sit still, thinking that this is a kind of deformity, but also an insult to film photography. They begin to use long professional terms or simplified versions of popular science film filters in terms of knowledge, To some extent, it is also flooding and vulgarizing the film filters.
Feelings, which are illusory, can only continue if there is a loyal community, and the maintenance of the community is indispensable to get a piece of the pie.
For the film camera APP, its early loyal users, real film machine enthusiasts and professionals automatically formed this community because of their love for film. On the one hand, it has inherent advantages over those head beauty camera apps that are planning to build vertical communities and try to get rid of tool attributes, which is convenient for the future development of photo social networking, but on the other hand, it also means that if you move too much to this community cheese, the small and beautiful film camera apps will break down along with the collapse of the community.
epilogue
Is there a future for filters as an independent product category? Maybe there will be. After all, the spring of film camera APP has not been long, and there is still much room for awareness improvement. No one knows whether they will have the next Meitu Xiuxiu, and whether they will take off again under the background of strangers' social interaction and other opportunities to encourage sharing.
But the market seems to have no patience to wait for the spring flowers to bloom.
The new trend of mobile phone photography has been growing one by one. For example, in recent years, the popularity of "Apple Original Camera Shooting+Post Modification" has never been less than that of film photography. The blogger will share in detail the modification parameters such as exposure, contrast, brightness, hue, color temperature and other modification techniques on the social platform. Ordinary people can DIY their own filters on the basis of the original camera shooting; There is also the emergence of online celebrity and celebrity personal style filters. Online celebrity selling personal style filters has even become a business with clear prices on Ins. The resurgence of plain face and raw pictures also directly threatens the aesthetics of traditional filters.
There are more and more ways to play the mobile phone filter, and the disdain chain is constantly being stirred. The film camera with a strong feeling may just be a passer-by. People's definitions of "beauty" and "photography" are always flowing.
As consumers, when we compete to advocate which filter and which type of camera has a higher B grid, and keep chasing the trend to decorate the circle of friends, perhaps more important is not to forget that the lens is an extension and simulation of the eye, which is always flawed. The essence of the filter is to restore reality and service art, and its existence itself is a reminder of lens defects. As far as the mobile phone shooting filter is concerned, its popularity has popularized the art of photography, but the essence of the filter is often ignored because of the beautification result orientation.
(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)
