Phota Labs Uses AI to Turn Everyday Photos Into Professional-Looking Shots
A new iOS app called Phota Labs gives users access to a personal AI photo assistant that transforms everyday snapshots into images that look like they were taken by a professional photographer—all while preserving the authenticity of the original scene.
Rather than offering yet another photo-editing tool, Phota Labs aims to leverage advances in AI to automate the editing process, making it easier for anyone to get better photos. The a16z-backed startup was founded by Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia, who met at Adobe while working on computational photography products including Project Indigo, Lightroom, and Photoshop.
The duo saw a gap in the market: while editing tools can be powerful for enhancing photos, they aren’t very effective at fixing a photo that wasn’t captured well in the first place. Phota Labs changes that by focusing on fixing the shot itself while preserving the natural appearance of the people in the image.
“Phota is your personal photo assistant that can make great photos for any moment you want to keep before you even ask, which means that it’s a very proactive experience,” Zhang told TechCrunch in an interview. “Think of it almost like a photographer or virtual photographer who looks over your camera roll and tries to understand what’s happening and how they could have taken that photo for you on the spot for that scene.”
From Wide-Angle to Portrait
The idea is to use AI to transform photos—whether that means turning a wide-angle group photo into a tighter portrait or transforming a selfie into a regular shot. Users can choose from different photography styles that determine how the AI transforms their images, ranging from subtle edits that preserve the original lens and composition to more dramatic transformations that introduce effects like fish-eye lenses, alternative angles, and entirely different perspectives.
Preserving Identity
While some people turn to ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to enhance or edit images, these tools can often alter a person’s appearance—especially when working with blurry photos—because they don’t know what that person actually looks like.
“For Phota, we built our own tech,” Zhang said. “We built this personalization technology that actually learns about people’s identi…”
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