PC, Andoid, and iOS alternatives to Prisma's photo art effects app

by Mihai Neacsu on 27 November 2017 · 4694 views

The Prisma app made headlines when first launched and continued to build up a solid user base since. Compared to the original Instagram filters, Prisma transforms your photos and videos using an image (usually a famous painting, but can be anything) as a base input, extracts the style from it via neural networks and artificial intelligence, then applies that style to a photo or video of your choice.

We covered online alternatives to Prisma in a previous article and we'll follow up here with a few desktop and mobile alternatives as well. Some of the apps below will work for Windows, others for Mac, Linux, iOs, Android, and even Windows mobile. Some will work 100% offline and others will require an internet connection. We'll point out more pros and cons so you can see what works for you best.

NeuralStyler (portable for Windows 64-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit)

NeuralStyler works with both images and videos, offline, and comes as a freeware, with no watermark added to your results.

NeuralStyler Artificial Intelligence converts your videos into art works by using styles of famous artists: Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, Georges Seurat, etc.

It comes with only 10 preset styles but you can also create your own style, although it's not a beginner friendly process.

You can select blend percentage (strength) before processing images or videos and you can adjust the belnd again at the end of the conversion.

The rendering/conversion works as fast as your PC resources (CPU, RAM) can handle it. It can timeout from insufficient RAM for higher resolutions, depending on the RAM installed; less apps running in background will result in more RAM being available for NeuralStyler to work with.

Don't forget to check the box "No scaling" to keep the original resolution, thus having high definition results.

NeuralStyler's interface on Windows

A small con would be the interface, which looks a bit rushed in the sense that it show video options only, but when you input a single image it will transform it just as fine into a single image. This is misleading in the way that at first glancing at the GUI, you would expect the software to work with videos only.

Style App (Windows and Mac)

Mac requirements: macOS 10.10 and up.

Windows requirements: 64-bit Windows 7 or higher (Windows 10 recommended), 4GB RAM or higher (8GB+ recommended)
350mb disk space.

You could make a style transfer of Vincent van Gogh’s "starry night" and an image of your dog to create a master piece.

Style App works with both images and videos and is free to try. The free version ads a watermark to your photo and restricts the resolution to 1024px. The lifetime license costs $10 USD only.

Style App's main window

The software works 100% offline using your computer resources. At the time of writing this article, Style App comes with 34 style presets to choose from.

One disadvantage is that there is no percentage blend option and you only get 100% of the art effect applied to your photos or videos.

Vinci (Windows Mobile, Android, iOS)

Built by VK.com, the very successful Russian alternative to Facebook, Vinci is a mobile app developed using the algorithm described in "Texture Networks: Feed-forward Synthesis of Textures and Stylized Images" (2016).

Vinci has dozens of trendy filters for quick photo editing, from simple retouching to various artistic styles and unique photo effects.

We tested the Android version of Vinci, which is free and supports images and short videos recorded by the phone's camera. The videos are then turned into GIFs after applying the art effects.

An image processed with the Vinci Android app and resized afterwards to 630 x 354 px

By default, a "Vinci" watermark is applied to the results, but that can be toggled off in Settings. You can free crop the image you want to transform, with 1:1 (square), 3:4, and 4:3 crop ratios, angle rotations, and rotations by 90 degrees available as well.

Vinci requires an active internet connection to work and comes with 35 styles at the moment - newer versions will probably add more though. After the style is applied, you can click that style once again and lower the blend percentage if you wish.

One disadvantage is the downsizing in resolution. Our test photos were downsized to 1600px, 1080px, or 1040px on the long edge.

Painnt (Windows 64-bit, Android, iOS)

The Painnt app works with images only and offers a free version, with limitations, as well as paid subscriptions.

Turn your photos into masterpieces! Choose from our selection of 1000+ filters, including classical, comic book, modern, abstract and mosaics. Preview and fine-tune settings for unique results, and render realistic paintings in high resolution.

We tested the Android version, which had 300 presets (including a "free only Today" section) as well as user shared styles. The free version comes with a watermark and output resolutions up to HD. After buying a subscription, which comes in weekly, monthly and annually flavors, you can remove the watermark, save the results in full HD, 4K, and original resolutions, as well as being able to use more art effects.

An image processed with Painnt on Android and saved as medium size (700 x 525 px)

The images are processed locally, right on your Android device, with no internet connection required for this. However, you do need an internet connection to browse the styles section and download the effects first.

You can crop your images before applying filters. After the effect is applied, you can do more post-processing to your image. Painnt comes with sliders for transparency, brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, noise reduction, sharpness, smoothness, wash, plus coloring filters and composition options.

Use the "Transparency" slider to choose the blending percentage between the original photo and the art effect being applied.

Painnt can include the original image as inset, split or juxtapose for your final result and it offers advanced settings such as the number of iterations (how many times to apply the effect), what brush size (1x or 2x) to use, and more.

Recap with download links. Prisma alternatives for:

Windows: NeuralStyler (64-bit only), Style (64-bit only), Painnt (Win 10 64-bit only)
Windows mobile: Vinci (Windows 10 and Windows Phone 8.1)
Mac: Style
Linux: NeuralStyler (Ubuntu 64-bit)
iOS: Vinci, Painnt
Android: Vinci, Painnt