It seems like everyone nowadays wants to post the best version of themselves online. Vacation photos, listing photos, family portraits, and every day snapshots of breakfast go through extreme scrutiny before posting, sending, or texting to our family, friends, or followers. Even my mom figured out how to paint away her wrinkles in Apple photos before she sent out her Christmas card this year.
This is what it actually looked like, we tell ourselves after extensive editing, this red really was that red, the sky really was that vivid, the trees that brilliant un-capturable shade of green. And perhaps the iPhone snapshot couldn’t accurately capture the minutia of color and vivid warmth we actually experienced in that moment. So we edit. We pinch and pluck and filter and filter again. It’s easy. It’s free. Why the heck not promote the best version of an image?
It’s no wonder the market for accessible AI (artificial intelligence) photo editing tools is so competitive.
Now, every social media app has auto photo editing capabilities and filters. One new app is trying something different – photo editing ai that can dissect a photo and edit each area differently. At least that’s what it claims.
Photolemur is an app that uses AI to enhance photos enough to be socially acceptable and maybe a little bit more.
We ran the free version through the ringer here at The Real Daily and found interesting results. Using a photo from Wiki commons of Yosemite National Park, we tested the auto editing features/filters of iPhoto, google photos, and photo lemur to see which got us the most drool worthy pic. Because drool worthy is so subjective, you can see for yourself below.
Personally, I think the Google Photos auto enhance feature hit the nail on the head. Photolemur looks a little unauthentic, and let’s face it, if you’re posting a photo that looks like you spent a lot of time editing it, you’ve already failed, even if it’s a shiny listing photo.
Photolemur looks at your photo pixel by pixel. It can differentiate faces, objects, horizon, and sky and it edits each differently. It can reduce noise in low light shots and can enhance the sky in landscapes so you don’t get white textureless nothing when the sky you’re looking at is true blue.
The app is relatively easy to use. Simply drag your photos into the editor and bam – you’re on your way to awesome pictures.
We tested this with some iPhone snapshots to some disappointment finding the standard phone filters were better at enhancing the mundane daily pictures than photolemur (see above).
Landscapes seem to fare better with their technology, but at $30 this may only be worth it to heavy users, and those folks likely desire a little more control over the look of the photos than photolemur can provide. All in all, it’s a cool tool but won’t put professional photographers out of business.
