Yes, letâs 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 âpainting effectâ 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. Thatâs new if you ask me.
Looks like itâs doing the same kind of job as these âstyle transferâ software demos, even so far as using some of the same source images:
There are neural networks involved somehow? I donât 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.
Thereâs a bunch of preset filters in the app, but to me an obvious evolution would be making new âfiltersâ 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 havenât really been updated for years.
This may be a gimmick, but it is a fun one, and I like the democratization of art. It doesnât 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 donât 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. Iâd love an engraving/cutline filter that would let me set the contour directions with with a few pen vectors on the image - that isnât something the crude half-tone superimposition filter Photoshop has had for a decade and still hasnât 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.
