What does the Phota Labs app do?
A new iOS app called Phota Labs wants to do the editing for you. The app works as a personal AI photo assistant that turns everyday snapshots into images that look like a professional photographer took them, and it aims to keep the picture authentic while doing so.
Phota Labs isn’t trying to hand consumers another photo-editing toolkit. Instead, the company is using recent advances in AI to automate the work that usually falls to the user. The idea is simple: editing software can make a good photo better, but it struggles with a picture that was poorly captured to begin with. Phota focuses on fixing the shot itself.
The startup was founded by Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia, who met at Adobe while working on computational photography products, including Project Indigo, Lightroom and Photoshop. Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z, backed the company, which raised a $5.6 million seed round led by the firm last year.
Zhang described the product as a proactive assistant. “Phota is your personal photo assistant that can make great photos for any moment you want to keep before you even ask, which means that it’s a very proactive experience,” she told TechCrunch in an interview. “Think of it almost like a photographer or virtual photographer who looks over your camera roll and tries to understand what’s happening and how they could have taken that photo for you on the spot for that scene.”
In practice, the AI can change the framing and perspective of a picture. It can turn a wide-angle group shot into a tighter portrait or transform a selfie into a more conventional photo. Users pick from several photography styles that control how far the AI goes. The milder options keep the original lens and composition. The more dramatic ones introduce effects such as fish-eye lenses, alternative angles and entirely different perspectives.
The founders say their approach sets Phota apart from general-purpose generative AI tools. Many people use ChatGPT and similar services to enhance or edit images, but those tools can change how a person looks, particularly in blurry photos, because they don’t know what that person actually looks like. Zhang said Phota was built to avoid that problem. “For Phota, we built our own tech,” she said. “We built this personalization technology that actually learns about people’s identity and is able to preserve them in any transformation we do to a photo.”
Images edited with Phota Labs carry invisible watermarks that identify them as altered by AI when they are shared on social platforms.
The company is first aiming at people who take a lot of photos and like to post them on social media, but don’t want to spend time editing them. The founders eventually see a wider audience, from retirees who want to create nice photos for their grandchildren to parents who want to share polished family albums with relatives and friends.
How does Phota Labs keep edited photos authentic?
Xia said authenticity is central to the company’s approach. “We have this obsession with authenticity,” he said. “I think there’s so much value in connecting AI with real moments and making sure those photos are not perfect, in a sense. That’s why we spend a lot of research into understanding personal context, into building this identity model because we want to make sure the photos are authentic. They’re just better photos of the same moment, rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is an AI image’.”
Xia said beta users were excited to see better versions of moments they had actually lived. They viewed the results as photos of real memories, not AI-generated images. The founders also found that users took more photos because they knew Phota could enhance them later.
Zhang said the company’s goal is to make photos that people want to keep. “We’re turning something that’s unusable into something that people want to print,” she said. “People who just love photos but never really got into editing can now experience professional quality that could never have been possible. So, I think that meant so much to us. There’s so many cherished moments for photos, and we really want them to be actually meaningful and something that you can remember.”
Is the Phota Labs app free?
Phota Labs is launching as a free app to build an initial user base. The company plans to explore a freemium model later. It also plans to release an Android app in the future.
Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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