Prisma is now the new rage

The halo around Pokémon GO is trending in the cyber world like wild fire and all other apps are lying low for the time being. The trending topic list on Facebook, however, shows the name of another app, Prisma, too right up there. The DIY (do-it-yourself) photo filter app Prisma transmogrifies even the dullest of your selfies to picture-perfect painting like images. Isn’t it cool? The app on iOS platform is such a rage that within a short time it has succeeded in drawing people in droves and even walked into the hearts of Bollywood celebs.

Prisma boasts of its skill to convert artists images into the style of Edvard Munch, Picasso, Van Gogh or Levitian together with other popular patterns and colours. Having 33 in-built filters means it liberally lets people appear in 33 different looks akin to paintings, all with one single photograph of theirs. The Prisma hashtag is gaining popularity in a staggering magnitude and on Facebook alone one can find too many applications of the app.

Some still like to draw parallels between Prisma to the early version of Instagram, and the app co-founder Alexey Moiseenkov has come out explaining. “It’s not similar to the Instagram filter where you just layer over... we draw something like a real artist would,” The Guardian quotes him as saying. There are for sure things beyond Photoshop filters and Insta magic to expect. The filter strength is likely to be increased in the coming days, Moiseenkov hints. The technology at play according to the company is an artificial intelligence-neural networks combo.

It works thus; you take a photo or upload an existing image from the gallery. Do enough cropping before applying the filter. Swipe left or right to adjust the intensity. Got it? Then flaunt it on Facebook or Instagram.

Some have accused Prisma of encroaching into artistic freedom, that it does with a few clicks and swipe what a painter can do with his/her dexterity and expertise! But then, there are enough delighted fans.