Top apps like Prisma to awaken your inner artist (Android and iOS)

The advent of machine learning is arguably one of the most important technological developments in the last couple of decades. Although it has been around for a while now, due to newer and better technologies, the machine learning algorithms of today are capable of processing data like never before. Machine learning is responsible for quite a few of the conveniences you might have grown accustomed to in the last couple of years online. The recommendations list next to YouTube videos that just seems to be getting smarter and smarter? That's machine learning. Recommendations for what you might like in online stores? Machine learning again. Self driving cars? Yup, you guessed it. It's gotten to the point where we are actually finding recreational uses for it, and we all know that a technology is truly mature when we begin using it for fun, right? Well, maybe not, but it has to have reached a certain level of development in order to be given into the hands of the average Joe.

Machine learning has spawned a fresh trend in mobile image editing apps. These new apps don't just overlay “filters” on top of your photos, but use cloud-based computing to turn them – or at least try to – into beautiful paintings. Unlike traditional filtering tools, this new breed of apps doesn't use your mobile device's hardware to process the images, but instead relies on remote servers to do the heavy lifting. And there's a lot of it.

We already know that you are thinking of Prisma, and there is a good reason for this. Not even two months after its launch, the Russian-made app has turned into a huge hit, spawning countless of imitators and wannabes across all mobile OSes. Despite its mind-boggling success, however, Prisma was not the first app of its kind, and it is certainly not the only one to use cloud-based editing. That's why we have decided to compile this list of cool apps for Android and iOS that do some of that AI-image-editing magic Prisma has become known for. Some of them might even prove better in certain scenarios and, who knows, maybe even faster at processing the final results? (spoiler: don't hold your breath on the latter)

Lucid

Lucid is a great free app for Android and iOS that has many of the same filters offered by Prisma, but also sports а number of its own unique ones as well. It does a good job at “paintifying” photos, and the process is quite fast if your internet connection is up to snuff. One big advantage that Lucid has over Prisma are the low quality thumbnail previews it displays before doing its thing. Once you load your photo and go to the filters screen, you will see a small preview of your image rendered in every style. This is very convenient and can save you some time applying filters that you might not like on a particular image. One gripe we have with Lucid is that at the time of writing there is no way to remove the watermark in the bottom right corner of the screen. Another is that the app crops photos to a square aspect ratio, just like its main competition.