Tired of the same old same old selfies and snapshots? Pixl changes the formula slightly by pixelating your images and bringing squares, triangles, half circles, and more.
If the front-facing camera isn’t quite doing it for those self-portraits and you tire of the same old look, it might be time to shake things up a little.
“Pixl” is one app designed to do that, and essentially brings shapes and a hint of control into a picture generator that changes the look of your images to something that kind of feels like your photos have been thrown into a blender with old school Frogger (or another retro video game), churned out to resemble a more angular watercolour and something loosely matching your image, or even tightly controlled.
In fact, Pixl’s usefulness comes because it can be controlled, with a few different sliders offering ways to manipulate how the image will turn out.
For instance, there’s size which will change the width and height of the pixelation style, and there are two of these that can be thrown in to mix it up, with squares, triangles, circles, and circle quadrants, providing a fair amount of pixelation control.
There is also a slider for details, and this will allow you to refine how many of the details are recreated in your photos. Drag it to the left and you won’t have as many recognisable details, and drag it to the right and you will.
Play with each of these and you’ll get a different style of image, with a colour control also there to enhance and reduce colour, again depending on where you drag the handle on the slider.
Pixl’s image effects can be applied to photos already on your device — what most people will probably do — as well as to images shot on the iPhone’s camera, but what it won’t do is apply these in real time to either of the photos.
Rather, what it does is load the image (or capture it with the camera, not saving the original image), let you fiddle with the settings, and pop out the converted image afterwards. From here, you can save the finished photo in landscape or portrait, and you’re done, free to post that onto a social media website or service, or just gaze at it longingly adapting your eyes into a more pixelated understanding of the world.
Pixl ends up being a nice diversion, though one that is iOS only at this time.
Fortunately, it’s free — we’re told at one point it wasn’t — but is at the moment an iPhone and iPad only affair. We’re checking with its developers Innoiz to find out whether that will change, but sadly you’ll need an iPhone if you plan to pixelate images in this way.
We’re sure you can do it in other ways on other phones — we seem to recall a camera filter for the Sony Xperia devices that did something similar, albeit with less control — but for now, this one appears to be Apple only.
