Turn Your iPhone Pics Into Watercolor Masterpieces With This Smart App
- 03.10.14
- 6:30 AM
Waterlogue is a photo filter app that doesn't suck. Illustrations by larryontheprarie/Flickr
It actually does a pretty good job at turning your smartphone pics into watercolor paintings. Illustration by Michael Haft
The app was created by John Balestrieri, a developer at the kid-centric app outfit Tinybop, along with Robert Clair. Illustrations by cajaygle/Flickr
. Instead of transforming the whole thing in a single pass, it creates each painting layer by layer, as a real artist would. Illustrations by Jeff Horne/Flickr
“Basically, through the process of tweaking the software, I would eliminate or reduce any marks that didn’t look like they were made by a sane individual,” Balestrieri says. Illustrations by Womino/Flickr
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We’ve all used software that promises to turn our photos into beautiful works of art. But let’s be real: they all suck. Waterlogue doesn’t. This novel iPhone app does more than turn smartphone pics into passable paintings. It actually conjures up some truly impressive ones.
The app was created by John Balestrieri and Robert Clair. Balestrieri, now a developer at the kid-centric app outfit Tinybop, has long been fascinated with computer graphics. He’s also long been disappointed with programs that tried to transform photographs into paintings. “They were horrible, blurry, terrible messes,” he says of the results you’d normally get from these pieces of software. “There have never really been any, I thought, that had any integrity.” So he resolved to build one of his own.
But Balestrieri didn’t start in on the coding right away. Instead, the former art student hit up second-hand bookstores and bought painting how-to books to brush up on the fundamentals. He also revisited some of those older programs and filters and found that most were based on textbook computer graphics algorithms from the ’70s. In other words, it wasn’t surprising they didn’t have the painter’s touch.
Penguins. Image: Flickr, umezy12
With Waterlogue, Balestrieri and Clair tried to write algorithms that approached images as a human would. Where older filters dumbly processed images at smallest unit of digital scale–the pixel–Waterlogue instead starts by distilling them into lines. It then boils those down to the ones that a person might actually draw–simplifying the image from a thousand tiny lines, say, to the hundred most essential ones. “Basically, through the process of tweaking the software, I would eliminate or reduce any marks that didn’t look like they were made by a sane individual,” Balestrieri says.
Next, the app simulates the actual painting process. Instead of transforming the whole thing in a single pass, it creates each painting layer by layer, as a real artist would. The app simulates the spreading and bleeding of the pigment onto the canvas, with dedicated properties for the virtual paper, the pigment, the brushes, the water and so on. When he was fine-tuning the app, Balestrieri eventually accepted the how-to books’ recommendations and programmed Waterlogue to paint scenes light to dark. The reason? He found his simulation was so accurate that when darker colors were put down first, they had too much time to bleed into the virtual canvas, ruining the final image.
It’s not perfect. In many of the 12 presets, faces get less detail than might be desired, with eyeballs ending up as coal black blobs. The painting process is indeed a process, so testing out the different presets takes a few seconds of waiting (though watching your image come to life layer by layer is much more interesting than your typical loading animation.)
Balestrieri says his painting algorithms are the most advanced he’s found in any commercial product. James Gurney, the author and illustrator of the seminal kids fantasy books Dinotopia gave it his stamp of approval, praising the app’s “visual intelligence” in a blog post.
Waterlogue’s sitting high on the App Store charts, with 230 five star reviews out of 285 total. That might have something to do with the low expectations we all have for this sort of software. But it’s also probably because, with Waterlogue, it’s clear that there’s a very thoughtful human touch behind the app’s painterly algorithms.
