TLDR: It means cross-processed.

So you have found yourself here, reading a blog post about an Instagram filter – probably not because you are remotely interested in reading about Instagram filters, but because you want to know how anyone could possibly write a blog post about them. Well let me tell you how we got this point. I once had a lot of fun at a party by asking people I had never met before what their favourite Instagram filter was. I had recruited a friend to fortuitously join the conversation after the question and volunteer their favourite, thus kick starting a ridiculous conversation about the (entirely made up) pros and cons of various filters. Our first victim didn’t see through the joke, but did think we were ridiculous, and told us so. This, as far as I was concerned was a victory, but it was not quite as amazing as when our second victim joined in, volunteering – ‘my favourite has to be x-pro two’. At this point I felt a little guilty at our ruse, and unable to detach myself from the situation of my own making I was compelled to actually take this favourite filters conversation seriously. 

The conclusion? The Instagram filters have ridiculous names. Much like paint colours and perfume, filters need names that allow us to refer to them as something other than things like ‘the one that makes everything a bit more red’ or ‘the one that makes it look like sunset all the time’. These names are too long, too descriptive, too much effort. So the Instagram team plucks names out of the air, apparently, if the internet is to be believed, based on artistic styles, their coffee intake, or the name of their dog. There is however one Instagram filter that is named after something slightly more meaningful. X-Pro II, though I didn’t know it the six or so years ago at that party, before I had even picked up a 35mm camera, is named after the results you get from processing a 35mm film in some way other than how it was supposed to be processed. This gives you the nice vignette, higher contrast and popping colours that we see when we use the filter. Hence the name. 

Except, it is not all as simple as that. X-pro is a short way of saying cross processing. If you are unfamiliar with the way in which films are developed, it is basically a chemical process – you leave the film in various chemicals for certain amounts of time and the film comes out of the end of the process developed. Films are supposed to be developed by using specific chemicals for specific amounts of time – like a recipe. However, because we’re grown ups and no one can tell us what to do, we can develop films with other chemicals, make up random amounts of time to develop for, or even use things we have found in the kitchen in place of our chemistry. Its a bit like getting ready made cookie dough, throwing away the cooking instructions and doing your own thing. Now much like the cookie dough analogy, sometimes this can be delicious, and sometimes you can end up with an inedible mess – the instructions are there for consistency, but not always creativity.

So what does this mean for x-pro II? Well basically that you very much could cross process a film and get something that looks just like you have applied the x-pro II filter, or you could get something that looks equally cool but completely different. The image below was taken on colour, rather than black and white film. Colour film involves a complicated chemical process to develop (colour film also has to be printed in complete darkness, and nobody has time for that, just one of the reasons all my pictures are black and white), but I chose to develop it with chemistry that is designed to be used with black and white film. Of course, because the manufacturer doesn’t suggest that this is a good idea, they have not told me the amounts of time I had to leave the film in the chemicals for. So I made it up. 

This next image was processed in exactly the same chemicals. Again, it was colour film, and because I quite liked the blue tint on the first image I decided to process it for the same amount of time (writing down these ‘recipes’ is a good idea). The one difference is that this particular roll of film was from a different manufacturer.

Two images that are stylistically completely different (they are actually of the same bridge, which is somewhere in Ipswich I think) from two colour films, with black and white chemistry.  This, really, is why cross processing film is more exciting than putting filters on Instagram – you never quite know what you’ll be getting, and if you don’t like it, unfortunately there is no swiping on to the next filter, you are stuck with it forever. Consider this next time you use x-pro II: out there, somewhere, is someone putting random film through random chemicals, and giving their images a look that no one has ever seen before.