Meet PhotoRoom<\/a>, a French startup that has been working on a utility photography mobile app. The concept is extremely simple, which is probably the reason why it has attracted a ton of downloads over the past few months.<\/p>\n After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When you’re done tweaking your photo, you can save the photo and open it in another app.<\/p>\n “My original vision comes from my time when I was working at GoPro,” co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif told me. “I often had to remove the background from images and when the designer was out of office, I would spend a ton of time doing it manually.”<\/p>\n And it turns out many people have been looking for a simple app that lets them go in and out as quickly as possible with an edited photo in their camera roll.<\/p>\n For instance, people selling clothes and other items on peer-to-peer e-commerce platforms have been using PhotoRoom to improve their photos. PhotoRoom is often recommended in online discussions or YouTube tutorials about optimizing your Poshmark<\/a> or Depop<\/a> listings.<\/p>\n Downloads really started to take off around February. PhotoRoom now has 300,000 monthly active users. The app is only available on iOS for now. And if you’re a professional using it regularly, you can pay for a subscription ($9.49 per month or $46.99 per year) to remove the watermark and unlock more features.<\/p>\n “Subscriptions are what works best on mobile for photo and video apps,” Rouif said.<\/p>\n Behind the scene, PhotoRoom uses machine learning models to identify objects on a photo. And the vision goes beyond removing backgrounds.<\/p>\n Photoshop, the clear leader in photo editing, has been designed decades ago. There’s a steep learning curve if you want to use it professionally. It’s hard to understand layers, layer masks, channels, etc.<\/p>\n PhotoRoom wants to build a mobile-first photo-editing app that doesn’t lazily borrow Photoshop’s metaphors and interface elements. “What would be Photoshop if you could understand what’s on the photo,” Rouif said.<\/p>\n While the app relies heavily on templates, you can tweak your images by adding objects, moving them around, adding some shadow and editing elements individually. Image composition is 100% up to the user.<\/p>\n Like VSCO, Darkroom, PicsArt, Filmic Pro and Halide, PhotoRoom belongs to a group of prosumer apps that are tackling photo and video editing from different ways. A generation of users who grew up using visual social networks are now pushing the limits of those apps — they look simple when you first use them, but they offer a ton of depth when you learn what you can do with them. And they prove that smartphones can be great computers, beyond content consumption.<\/p>\n Rouif was the head of product at Stupeflix, <\/a> a powerful video editing app that was acquired by GoPro back in 2016<\/a>. PhotoRoom is just getting started as there are only four people working on the app, including two interns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tags:<\/b> Romain Dillet<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meet PhotoRoom, a French startup that has been working on a utility photography mobile app. The concept is extremely simple, which is probably the reason why it has attracted a ton of downloads over the past few months. After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When … Continue reading PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo<\/span><\/a> Continue Reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/frames-fashion.png\")
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Romain Dillet<\/p>\n
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