2016 Jul 20
by the Editorial
There’s a new photo editing app in town that everyone is raving about. Just a few days ago, the Pokémon Go obsession hit the roofs and now Prisma has joined the race too! What’s better than an app that blots our faces and our insecurities with it? J Prisma is an all new photo editing app, an overnight success rather that uses neural networks and artificial intelligence to turn your photo into impressionist paintings within seconds.
What makes Prisma different to filters that used to put your face on billboards or drawing canvases with the Parisian Eiffel Tower in the background? You know, those filters that convert your photo onto a pencil sketch or painting and wouldn’t stop there, but add in a not at all relevant setting and props. That age is long gone and Prisma is an app that looks and feels a lot more sophisticated. This is why, it’s a very simple photo editing app that allows you to select one of 30+ filters inspired by famous painters or patterns.
Instead of applying the picture over the image, the app regenerates a new photo taking in your chosen art requirements. My Facebook and Instagram timeline yesterday was literally Prisma-packed. From your faces to your dogs, Prisma did make it a whole lot better and nicer to look at. What’s even more cooler about it is the fact that it’s not just some random filters, given the choice of famous legendary artists, that as filters, Prisma offers, you now have all the rights to say “This is how Van Gough would have painted my face”. Your face could have had been a bigger hit than Starry Night!
The app was launched in June and was only available for IOS devices. Already #1 download in a load of countries, Prisma has been downloaded over 7.5 million times, generating 1.5 million daily active users. For those of you using Andriod and now have one more reason to hate Apple for, Prisma just unveiled its beta app for Andriod users. Here’s some step by step instructions:
- Pick any one from a list of icons representing different styles to transform your photos.
- Wait for the app to complete computation for the astounding results.
- You can also slide your finger to adjust the intensity of the look from 0% to 100%.
“We’re not just overlaying like an Instagram filter. We create the photo from scratch. So there is no photo, we took your photo, then perform some operations and give a new photo to you. So deep learning is like an artist, something like that,” said Prisma’s CEO and co-founder Alexy Moiseenkov. Here’s a slightly technical explanation of how Prisma works. It uses “a combination of neural networks and artificial intelligence” to edit the pictures. Instead of the image being edited inside your phone, it’s being sent to the servers, which are based in Russia, and the result then returned to your phone.
What’s interesting is that the developers of this app are also working on expanding their filter technology to video. Alexey Moiseenkov, co-founder of Prisma, has even published a 360 degree image on Facebook that shows how the video filters might work for this app. The first look is superb and now we are really hoping and waiting for the video feature of this app to go live. Moiseenkov has grown up loving painting and his favourite artist is the renowned Danish-French impressionist, Camille Pissarro. Surprisingly, Moiseenkov has a computer science background and it’s amazing to see him merge the two fields so brilliantly.
It’s about time we bid farewell to Valencia and the other boring filters on Instagram, because the futures taking over.
