AI-powered Prisma photo editing app now works offline for most filters

Prisma first launched on iOS back in July, bringing AI-powered artistic photo filters to the iPhone. We were impressed with the quality and variety of filters, noting the server-side machine learning aspect that made these filters possible, but Prisma’s popularity was often too much for those servers and resulted in slow filter previews. Today Prisma seems to have solved that problem by making most of its filters available offline.

What’s New in Version 2.4

Prisma is now Offline!
The majority of Prisma styles will no longer need an Internet connection.

Introducing charity styles!
‘Philanthropic’ styles are now available to Prisma users who can choose to not only have “a love” filter that is probably the most beautiful, but also to donate $1 to an Elbi charity.
Make your content meaningful and let’s make the world a better place together <3

You’ll have to see for yourself how the updated version compares to the previous approach, but CNN has a bit more information about the change:

“The technology behind Prisma — deep learning — is a bridge between your imagination and your digital creation,” CEO Alexey Moiseenkov said in a statement. “Now, people can carry that power in their pockets.”

[…]

Deep learning requires a computer with 60 times the graphics processing power of a smartphone to edit one photo, according to Prisma. With over 35,000 photos converted each minute, the Prisma team needs thousands of graphics processors, which isn’t scalable.

To solve this problem, the Prisma team has, in essence, outsourced that computational process to the smartphone, according to Leon Gatys, whose research and DeepArt.io project inspired the app.

This was accomplished by reducing the deep learning neural network “to throw away unnecessary parts” while still maintaining the performance on a weaker machine.

You can try the latest version of Prisma out for free on the App Store.