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Online photo editing tool Pixlr wants you to know it's got AI chops, too.
Pixlr isn't quite as old as Adobe's Photoshop, but it has been around longer than your average AI startup. It was founded in 2008 as a standard photo editor with zero AI functionality. After a few changes of ownership, founder Ola Sevandersson is back with high hopes for Pixlr's latest AI tools.
In November, Pixlr added AI tools, including an image generator, a generative fill tool, a background removal tool and image expansion functionality.
Pixlr tries to distinguish itself as a more user-friendly platform than its competitors, but says it can also still cater to more advanced users. Those competitors are a formidable bunch, including Adobe's Photoshop (and its Firefly AI tool), Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, PhotoRoom and Leonardo.ai, which was just acquired by graphic design platform Canva. The price is right -- there's a free version -- but Pixlr will have to do more than offer basic AI functionality if it's going to stand out from the crowd.
To use Pixlr, you click on "sign up/log in" and create an account with your email. Once verified within a minute or so, you can start.
I wanted to try out the image generation feature, so I asked Pixlr to create an image of a scene at the Olympics with a triumphant athlete winning a gold medal for the first time.
The first result was more cartoonish than I was imagining, so I played around with styles, which include anime, neon punk, photographic and origami.
Overall, they were all pretty good -- although the trophy in one athlete's hand was glitchy. Still, for a free image generation tool, it's not bad. (In addition to the unpaid version, Pixlr has subscription plans, which range from 89 cents per month to $9.91 per month.)
I wanted to give Pixlr more of a challenge, so I asked for an image of She-Ra dining at a Waffle House. (She-Ra was He-Man's twin sister and the heroine of my childhood.)
I was actually fairly impressed by these results -- although I didn't realize there was a She-Ra reboot in 2018, which is perhaps what Pixlr was referencing. I think anyone who's been to a Waffle House would agree the restaurant depictions were rather optimistic. And the more realistic versions of She-Ra in photographic style had dead eyes. Still, I was impressed Pixlr knew who She-Ra was.
When I asked him how Pixlr compares to photo editors like, say, Photoshop, Sevandersson said it boils down to ease of use. Anyone can access Pixlr online for free.
"We tried to take the technology and kind of dumb it down to make sure it works for most people," Sevandersson said.
He declined to cite the number of users, instead saying Pixlr generates millions of images per day. However, a November press release said the photo editor is used by nearly 10 million people monthly.
"One of the most-used features on our site is still cropping," he added. "Even if someone goes to [OpenAI's image generator] Dall-E and generates an image, they want to crop it anyway."
That cropping feature is a relic of Pixlr's past. Founded in 2008, the company was acquired by software company Autodesk in 2011 and then stock photo agency 123RF in 2017.
Sevandersson left after the Autodesk deal and returned under 123RF. Pixlr has since been spun out, but 123RF retains a stake. It is now based in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
"Five years ago, we started rebuilding everything," he said of the original photo editing tool. The background removal tool was Pixlr's first AI product.
"The biggest change started pretty much two years ago when the first generative image generator started showing up," Sevandersson added. "That's when we knew this new technology is coming to disrupt everything. No one is going to sit and do photo editing like we did before."
