Prisma app đŸ”ș

Continuing the discussion from Why all of us need to be futurists:

Yes, let’s talk about Prisma. It started popping up all my timelines, and after a quick download-and-try I must say this looks actually very interesting.

Yes, the “painting effect” gimmick has been available for decades in Photoshop and the like, and usually best avoided, to be fair, but this feels to me like a cleverer way of making computers fake artistry than what came before.

Still often looks like crap, but sometimes
 Kind of good, surprisingly. That’s new if you ask me.

Looks like it’s doing the same kind of job as these ‘style transfer’ software demos, even so far as using some of the same source images:

(both via kottke)

There are neural networks involved somehow? I don’t know how it works, you geniuses tell me. But the result is clearly applying elements figured out from a source image to another image of your choice.

There’s a bunch of preset filters in the app, but to me an obvious evolution would be making new “filters” from any image you throw at it. At that level I can imagine some trippy still image and video uses for a more pro-software-plugin version of this.

Not sure how threadworthy this topic is, but felt like sharing in case anyone else finds this an interesting mainstreaming of a graphics-nerd tech concept.

Apps like this are some of the few reasons why I wish I had an iPhone rather an Android. This is not available on my platform it looks kind of fascinating. The Photoshop filters have always been sort of subpar in terms of creating a real painterly looking effect - and they haven’t really been updated for years.

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Sounds neat. I dig this sort of thing.

download from Apple App Store

Too rich for my blood. Shame. :frowning:

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@Skeptic @M_M Looks like Android is promised for ‘later this month’. Gotta move fast before the fad fades, I guess.

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Cool!

This may be a gimmick, but it is a fun one, and I like the democratization of art. It doesn’t replace the skill of a painter, but it does allow unskilled consumers to enjoy creating images that evoke some of the aesthetics of various styles of painting.

My pet peeve with Photoshop is that it could use a more of this - yes, yes, I know, pros don’t use gimmicks like this. Instead, some of them labor over creating over elaborate recipes to do things an intelligent filter could do better or faster. I’d love an engraving/cutline filter that would let me set the contour directions with with a few pen vectors on the image - that isn’t something the crude half-tone superimposition filter Photoshop has had for a decade and still hasn’t updated. Computers should do the heavy lifting and repetitive tasks, and not everything I do justifies sending out for an artist to create custom engravings or whatnot when a smart, and customizable program, can get close enough.

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Well, there are some other new smart filters that are surprisingly good when fed the right image, such as Waterlogue:

This one doesn’t work on my Android phone either. :-/

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