We’re delighted to announce the launch of Priime, a new way to edit photos on your iPhone.
Priime is a fast, modern editor that allows you to edit using styles developed by top photographers, with a focus on stunning aesthetics and uncompromising quality.
Our Story
In summer 2014, founders Arthur, Andrew, Joe, and Loren came together over our love of photography and building things that we believe should exist. Through photowalks, brainstorms, and meeting up with photographer friends we realized that, while there are many mobile photo editors, none of them truly satisfied what people today want to do.
When we asked ourselves what could be better with mobile photography today, a few things stood out to us:
- It’s easy to know how you want your photo to look, but hard to translate that into adjusting dozens of dials.
- Filters are a great shortcut to achieving a look, but most filters come in huge lists with little information about what they’re for.
- Most of us are inspired by other great photographers yet there isn’t a clear way to make your photo look like theirs.
- Using many photo editors leads to multiple copies of each photo on your camera roll. A clean, well-edited camera roll would be a nice thing to have.
- Many apps had adjustment tools that made our photos look worse or did things we didn’t expect.
- Broadly, the user experience of most mobile photo editing apps still lags behind that of other app categories.
We’re building Priime to bridge these gaps. Here are a few of the things that have driven the design from the beginning:
Styles: More than filters
Filters are wonderful tools, and we see styles as the next logical step in making editing easier. Priime styles are made by a photographer trying to capture a specific kind of shot they take. If you follow Michael O’Neal, for example, and like his aesthetic, you can use his styles to achieve the same look. Here’s an example of a style:
Styles come with detailed descriptions of what they do, and when to use them. They come with galleries of examples. Whether you’re shooting food, interiors, portraits, sunsets, or landscapes, we have something to capture many of the most popular looks today.
Finally, styles “know” what they are supposed to be used for, which brings us to:
Smart Suggestions
A portrait is very different than a sunset. A snowy winter day is very different than a sunny, vibrant spring landscape. Applying a sunset edit to a portrait is the quickest way to mess up skin tones and make someone look like a tomato, because sunsets like vibrant reds and portraits don’t.
When you edit a photo with Priime, it is analyzed for dozens of attributes from color palette to exposure to subject matter, and paired with an appropriate set of styles. This reduces the number of looks you have to tap through to see what works best on your photo (although you can always explore the full list if you want).
Whether you shoot and edit photos all the time or just occasionally, getting inspiration during your editing process makes things more quick and interesting.
Improved Experience
Priime is fast and gestural. There’s no importing of photos, no tapping through albums and sub-albums to edit the last photo you took. Just open Priime and your camera roll is right there, ready to go. You can save, non-destructively, directly over the original photo on your camera roll rather than create many copies. You can copy and paste edits, roll back through visual edit histories, and generally do the nice things you would expect from a professional quality photo editing tool. And Priime never reduces the size of your photos.
When you want to go deeper than a single tap edit, Priime’s adjustments will delight you. Many apps have that one adjustment that just looks bad, or doesn’t work the way you thought it would. We are building Priime’s toolset with thought and care so that it works exactly the way you want and leads to gorgeous edits.
The Future
Photography is becoming more and more like written language — what used to require special training and obscure tools is quickly becoming accessible to everybody, and we are using it to tell our stories. We’re dedicated to helping people tell their stories the way they want, to create their art with tools that get out of the way, and to connect with each other to live more beautifully. Priime is our first step in that direction, and we are excited for you to join us.
Priime is backed by investors including Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Harris, Waynn Lue, Russell Cook, and Y Combinator. We’re grateful for these folks, who support our mission of pushing the field of photography forward.
You can download Priime on the App Store today.