10 amazing Prisma app images that started as simple selfies
The Prisma app, which transforms normal photos into amazing images that attempt to replicate the human artistic touch, is officially a hit.
First released back in June in the Apple App Store, the app has quickly been adopted by thousands of users posting Prisma-enhanced images to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
But unlike some apps that merely apply light and color filters to images, Prisma claims to use a combination of neural networks and artificial intelligence to take the art styles of famous artists, as well as other art styles, and combines them with your photos to create stunning new images.
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We touched upon this kind of AI-powered photo manipulation last year, but this new app makes it so simple to achieve great results that it's easy to see why the app has quickly become popular.
Let's be clear, this app is no substitute for the high-level work of professional fine artists and illustrators who operate not by algorithm by inspiration and human skill. However, the results of some of the images taken into the Prisma app are nonetheless fascinating simulacrums of real art.
How fascinating? We took a deep dive into some of the photos tagged #prisma on Instagram in just the last 24 hours and some of the images are truly compelling, particularly the portraits. In the art world, getting the emotion and spirit inherent in the human face right is often viewed as a hallmark of visual merit. In the case of Prisma, the app renders surprisingly striking portraits, as you can see in the gallery below.
So with all that, you have enough awesomeness to occupy photo sharing fans for the foreseeable future. That should be enough, right? Wrong. Here's the kicker: Prisma plans to roll out the app for video in the future. Those future plans were confirmed by The Next Web a few days ago.
That means groundbreaking films like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly (both by director Richard Linklater), which used rotoscoping to apply similarly surreal effects to the real world, will likely become common in the very near future.
In the meantime, the photo version of the app is currently iOS only, but it is coming to Android later this month.
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