How Good is PicsArt Photo and Video Editing App

The well-known image-editing and photo-social-networking software PicsArt is constantly evolving, adding AI-enhanced art filters similar to those made popular by the Prisma app, which can change mobile photographs and make them look to be genuine works of art by masters like Picasso or Mondrian. This iPhone app has received a clear makeover in addition to this inclusion, and it now has a more enticing pricing structure: You are no longer need to pay to eliminate adverts. The idea of remixing images and drawings is undoubtedly PicsArt's most inventive contribution.

I tested PicsArt on my iPhone 6s, which is compatible with Windows Universal, Android, iOS, and mobile devices. Make sure to free up some space on your phone because the download is 153MB in size. The app is free to download and use, and there is a considerable amount of free content available. However, there are in-app purchases available for clipart sets, stickers, typefaces, and frames, the majority of which cost 99 cents or $1.99. Without even making an account, you can begin to get a sense of what PicsArt can achieve, which is a feature I like in any programme I'm evaluating.

The Outlook

Although it still has a wide range of editing capabilities, the most recent PicsArt version has a lighter, cleaner, and less crowded appearance. You swipe down from the Home screen to access your social media photo stream, much as on Instagram. If the poster has added the hashtag #FreeToEdit, you may love, comment on, repost, or remix the image with only a button push. Tap the blue Remix pencil button if it displays a number to view other users' remixes of the current image.

You may add your own image by pressing the magenta Plus sign button and selecting it from the Camera Roll, the Phone's camera, or by beginning a sketch on a blank canvas. The plus symbol can also be used to begin a collage. Your PicsArt creations may also be based on your Facebook, Flickr ($0.00 at Apple.com), or Instagram photographs.

You can zoom in and out by pinching the screen, show more controls by pressing the + button, inspect your image both before and after an action, undo the previous change, and restore it to as it was before. Every effect has sliders and a brush that enable you determine where to apply or remove the effect.

Tools include curves, masks, clone/stamp, cropping with shape, brushes, borders, text, and lens flares. Photoshop, beware! And don't even get me started on clip art. There are sets for everything from travel to sports to nature to birthdays to moustaches to babies to love to bunnies.

With more than 20 different brush types and forms that may alter on a 3D plane, drawing tools also push the software into Photoshop territory. The marker brush's opacity, size, and even "squish" may all be changed. You may choose from 30 different fonts for text overlays, choose a colour, and use a handle to change the size to your preference. You may start a drawing with or without a picture backdrop, and Photoshop-style layers are supported.

Red-eye correction, dental whitening, stamp-and-clone, and blemish removal are all included, of course. With little skin problems, the blemish tool worked well. Auto-object selection and edge recognition are two features that are absent, at least not to the same extent as in Adobe Mix and Photoshop Touch. For instance, when I applied fake tan to a friend's face, the brown overlay changed both the backdrop and this skin tone. Although the cloning tool is entertaining, don't anticipate content-aware object removal similar to that in Adobe's Mix and Photoshop.

How to use the Magic Effects in PicsArt Mod App

While Prisma may have made AI-powered filters that transform your images into pieces of art more well known, PicsArt's Magic Effects provide a feature that is not available in Prisma: the ability to apply the filter only to a specific region of the image. In this way, you might make a model's eyes appear realistic while making the rest of the body look like it came straight from a Mondrian painting.

Using the local processing of your phone, PicsArt applies its Magic Effects. This implies that, unlike Prisma, you don't need an Internet connection to utilise it. However keep in mind that they take longer to produce than other picture filters since they require a lot of processing. In my testing, they took an average of 15 to 20 seconds to complete. That's roughly how long it takes to apply Prisma filters. You won't ever receive "server overloaded" notifications using this method instead of a cloud-processing system like the one used by Prisma.

You may choose among blending modes similar to those employed by Photoshop layers while using Magic Effects. You may thus select the blending options Normal, Multiply, ColorBurn, Darken, Lighten, Screen, Overlay, SoftLight, HardLight, and Difference. Although it's enjoyable to experiment with them, I frequently think the default configuration looks the best. Prisma has 30 basic art styles, compared to PicsArt's 10, and some of them are more spectacular than PicsArt's, though business personnel assured me that more will be added.

How to Use Collages

Collages aren't feasible with most photo social applications, but PicsArt offers a plethora of layouts, borders, and backgrounds for collage creation, as you can see in the image below.

How Sharing Tool in PicsArt Works

You may spend a lot of time working on an image thanks to the app's abundance of editing features. With a button push, you can save the image at any time to the Camera Roll, but you'll probably want to share it with others, and the app has plenty of sharing choices. There are built-in sharing options for Facebook, email, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, and when uploading to PicsArt's own service, you may choose to publish to Facebook and Dropbox at the same time. You can include location and keyword tags when submitting an image.

All the typical social networking functions, including commenting, favoriting, and following, are supported both the app and the PicsArt website. The swiping movements are well used in the UI, which is well-designed and user-friendly.

With the many creative tools available in PicsArt, contests are a welcome addition. The results of user voting are presented on the PicsArt blog.

Why PicsArt's is Successful

Compared to, say, Instagram, PicsArt very much approaches photo editing in the complete other way. PicsArt provides far more image editing tools than the former, which emphasises simplicity. In addition to having more flexible filters, it also has capabilities similar to Photoshop, such as layers, clone stamps, curves, and masks. It is much more than simply a picture software thanks to its drawing tools and clip art. All of this, though, carries the risk of overly edited, artificial shots, which Instagram does a decent job of mitigating by restricting the options and the degree to which those options may alter images.

Those who enjoy editing their phone images to the nth degree should definitely switch to PicsArt instead of Instagram. Or at the very least, edit your photographs with PicsArt before uploading them to Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and the rest. Yet, PicsArt's extensive social network may just have enough like-minded image creators to meet their demands. PicsArt is undoubtedly a PCMag Editors' Choice, but Flickr and Instagram, two other iPhone social-photo apps Editors' Picks, have a larger user base and some really cool picture capabilities of their own.

Final Words

Popular and feature-rich picture editor PicsArt Photo Studio is now accessible on iPhones as well as Android devices.

PicsArt Photo Studio provides all of those things and much more. In fact, this software offers so many capabilities that it might be a little intimidating, especially with the quantity of interface components on the screen.

You may take a fresh photo or use one from your photo bank, much like other photo effect applications. The buttons at the bottom of the interface allow you to interact with the app's primary functions when an image is shown. The image may be rotated, cropped, and resized using the tools button. Other tools include one that allows you to crop the image to a specified form. You also have a button for effects, including Artistic, Paper effects, ColorSplash, and straightforward colour adjustments.

You may then add text, shapes, and even another photo on top of the original image by using the drawing button to draw on it with a completely configurable paintbrush. A frame and a mask may then be applied to your image. Lastly, there is an Add option that allows you to add things like text, callouts, additional frames, and clip art. The possibilities for what you can do with an image are almost endless.

Having a tonne of features is nice, but with this software, I worry when it gets to be too much. Throughout my testing, I occasionally observed that controls and sliders, all of which may be beneficial in particular circumstances, were taking up too much of my screen. But perhaps the issue I have with it has more to do with the Interface than it does with what the programme can achieve. Whatever it is, there are times when I feel as though the controls are taking up my whole screen.

When you've finished editing your image, you may send it by email, share it on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, or show it to other PicsArt users. If you're seeking for fresh inspiration, the PicsArt community is a terrific place to browse because to its enormous image library. Also, it features the well-known like and comment buttons, and you can see and follow the photographs of particular individuals.

With features to suit practically every occasion, PicsArt Photo Studio offers you a tonne of options to experiment with your photographs. If you believe you need more, there's even more to download (like free clip-art libraries), but I think you'll find that PicsArt has quite a lot to work with right out of the box. This programme is a must-try for anybody searching for an all-encompassing picture editing and effects tool.