#tonr

Tonr — The Photo App That Makes Your Melanin Pop!

Instagram is obviously one of the most popular photo editing apps available right now. And for people with darker skin tones, the only solutions Instagram offers to the white biases of our phones’ cameras is to make us lighter. Making darker skinned people lighter only reinforces lightness/whiteness as a standard of beauty and does nothing to celebrate those with darker skin.

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That’s where tonr.co comes in. Created by a group of app developers, including three Black women, who wanted to create an app that was inclusive, tonr currently consists of 10 photo filters that “amplifies how beautiful a variety of skin tones are instead of washing them out.”

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Something else I really love about the app is that it’s open source software. This means that anyone with the skill set can contribute a filter to the app and that’s amazing. Even open source communities are still often completely white and male, and by creating this possibility, the creators of tonr have made it possible for those who don’t often get a voice in technology to have one.

There’s finally a photo filtering app that won’t whitewash people of color

When Alesha Randolph wants to post a selfie on Instagram, she knows there's only one filter that is flattering to her skin tone: Sierra. Yes, Instagram filters can work against people of color.  But Randolph, a senior designer at Vox, and her fellow designers and engineers were tired of accepting it as a given. So they developed Tonr, a photo-editing desktop app built to enhance and affirm nonwhite skin tones.