Turn Your Photos into Watercolor Paintings in Under a Minute
Watercolor paintings from photos? Really? We know. This sounds like an app that will make you a hotel painting artist in no time, but we promise it’s not quite that cheesy. Hot on the artistic apps scene is Waterlogue, an iOS app that can turn any of your photos into a watercolor style work of art.
Cleverly described as “photography, distilled,” Waterlogue ($2.99 on iOS) is actually pretty amazing. We’ve seen other apps that turn photos into art, but they all do it in a pretty dialed down fashion. Replacing key elements of someone’s face with blobs of color that don’t read at all, and the like. This app, however, seems like it was made by actual watercolor artists, and recognizes the nuances that make a piece of watercolor art beautiful.
It’s packed with all sorts of ways to customize your piece. Flow through different filters to create a different mood, lighten or darken your “painting” and add borders.
You simply select a photo from your library, and let the app do the rest. In under a minute, your photo has been turned into a luminous work of art… and you didn’t even have to rinse out your paintbrushes!
It’s almost done!
The results.
Straight up, we’ve got mixed feelings about this app. We are super impressed by what it can create, but wonder where that leaves actual artists who’ve spent years perfecting the art of watercolor. We think it could be a really cool tool to sort of virtually sketch out a concept for a painting, and could seriously aid in the learning process. We’re just not sure we want to get the inevitable invitation to a gallery opening where all the paintings were made in Waterlogue. That is, unless there are some creative ways you can hack it! Gah! As you can see, we are very much on the fence here.
Fence or not, we tried out lots of different photos with this app. Here are the results!
