Hey everyone,
In one of our previous posts we laid out our long term plan for NeuralCam - building smart camera apps for different areas and use cases, starting with photography. We continued going down this path, and today we’re pleased to present you the next AI powered camera app that we’ve built for you.
Photo editing apps are cool and have become very popular lately, but each of them requires some amount of photo editing skill to use. Be it a basic editing app or a professional desktop application like Lightroom, it requires quite some amount of time and effort to get nice photos and even so, results are still quite different from the professional look that most users strive for.
Today we’re launching ProStyle Camera, a new app and platform that aims to make photo editing significantly easier and more accessible by mixing the power of AI and the creative power of professional photographers.
ProStyle is a photo editor and camera app that edits photos with one tap in the style of a professional photographer. At the same time, it’s also a platform for creating these AI powered professional editing styles and then selling them through the built-in Style Store.
At the heart of ProStyle is a proprietary AI engine that can learn a photo editing style from a dataset of edited photos and can apply the learned style to photos taken by the user on their phone. This allows users to edit photos with one tap similar to what pro photographers achieve using professional photo editing software and years of experience, also containing the fine details of their unique editing style.
The ProStyle app provides two ways of editing photos. The primary way is through a camera interface that feels exactly as a normal iPhone camera, but shoots photos automatically edited in the style of the selected photographer. With the second option users can import photos taken with the default camera (or any other camera) and have the photo edited with one tap in an editor-like user interface.
All this technology would be worthless without the actual styles created by photographers. At ProStyle we’ve worked with professionals to create a default set of editing styles that cover the most important editing trends we’ve seen out there. Going beyond that, we’ve realized that it’s impossible for a company to provide the variety of styles that photographers have and users expect. In order to create this variety we’ve created a platform that allows photographers to create their own AI powered editing styles and sell these styles to users.
Creators can apply on the ProStyle page, and once signed up they have to provide a dataset of edited photos that our algorithm can learn from. Using this data an AI model is trained on the ProStyle servers, after which the only thing remaining is to set a price and publish the style in the Style Store that’s built into the ProStyle app.
By accessing the Style Store, users can discover and buy styles form creators, with a simple in-app purchase. Creators can set the price for their style and revenue is shared for every purchase: the creator takes 50% and ProStyle takes 20% (the remaining 30% goes to Apple as the standard App Store in-app purchase fee).
When using the camera mode to shoot photos in a certain style, the ProStyle AI camera has some additional tricks up its sleeve to make photos even more pro looking:
- Auto-portrait mode: Automatically blurs the background but only where it makes sense (people or object detected)
- Auto straightening: automatically straightens photos. A subtle way to create a more professional look.
- AI Composition: can automatically “zoom in” on the subject of the image to create a tighter crop with less distractions in the background. Not available in the launch version, but coming soon!
All these features maintain the simplicity of a point and shoot camera but create more professional looking photographs as a result. The ProStyle app itself is free in the App Store and comes with 8 built-in pro AI editing styles carefully created by the ProStyle team. These are generic editing styles representing current pro editing trends and are usable in most everyday situations too. As mentioned before, further editing styles from professional photographers can be purchased from the Style Store. Besides the free functionality mentioned above, there is also an option to sign up for the ProStyle Membership at a price of $19.99/year, which provides access to additional AI features and early access to features that we’ll be adding.
One more thing. One advantage of editing using neural networks is that the editing process itself is very fast. A long pipeline of complex image processing algorithms gets simplified into a set of matrix multiplications that run very quickly and efficiently on dedicated hardware like the iPhone’s built in NeuralEngine. This technological change allowed us to create an optimized version of the ProStyle Engine that can edit FullHD video in real-time on the iPhone using the same professional level of editing. This Video Mode is included in the ProStyle Membership and it allows users to shoot pro-looking, color graded video using any of the built-in or purchased editing styles.
You can download the ProStyle Camera app from the App Store, using the link below. Make sure to send us all your feedback over at hello@prostyle.cam - we'd love to hear from you.