The art of the fuzzy photo

Technology has made taking great, sharp, richly colored photographs easy. So, of course, it's now cool to make pictures look as if they were taken on pinhole cameras or broken Instamatics with exploding flashcubes.

Smartphone applications for achieving that vintage look are enormously popular and make it easy to doctor photos and then post them online.

Here are two:

Instagram, free from Burbn Inc., has an array of preset photo effects that you can apply while taking a picture, or use to alter an existing photo from the camera roll in your iPhone.

Burbn officials have said repeatedly that they're working on an Android version of this popular app, but none is currently available.

The photo-sharing part is quite simple. First, you sign in with Instagram on your initial use of the app. From then on, photos finished within the app go to the Instagram server.

When you tap "feed" in Instagram, you see a display of the photos that you and the people you follow on the service have posted. Tap "popular" to see pictures posted by other users, find people to follow, and "like" or comment on their pictures, as one would on Facebook.

In addition, you may post photos to accounts at Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and several photo-sharing sites.

When a photo is shared on Facebook using this app, it posts a thumbnail on your Facebook page. But instead of dropping the photo into a Facebook album, the thumbnail serves as a link to your larger image, stored at Instagram.com.

The downside is that no one can post a Facebook comment on such a photo, which may cramp the style of some Facebook users.

If you want a freer hand to tinker with your pictures, there's Adobe Photoshop Express for Android and iPhone. The app is free, but in-app purchase offers include a $4.99 Adobe Camera Pack with some added effects and timers.

The free effects will do for most people and achieve the blurry-vignette, black-and-white, and pop-art styles with ease. The Adobe app goes beyond Instagram with tools for some detailed tinkering in effects such as saturation and "sketch."

The app works with Facebook, TwitPic, and Photoshop.com when you want to upload and share. If you utilize the free Photoshop.com site, you can send your photos there and take advantage of a broader offering of additional editing options and tricks, including red-eye correction, resizing, and image-distortion tools.