A new iOS application named Phota Labs provides users with a "personal AI photo assistant" that can turn casual snapshots into photos that look as if they were taken by professional photographers, while preserving the authenticity of the images.

Phota Labs is not about providing consumers with a new photo editing tool, but rather about leveraging the advancements of AI to automate the editing process, allowing anyone to obtain better photos more easily.

This startup company, which receives support from a16z, was founded by Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia. The two have previously worked together at Adobe and have been involved in the development of computational photography products, including Project Indigo, Lightroom, and Photoshop.

The two founders noticed a gap in the editing tools available on the market. They believed that although photo editing tools can effectively enhance the appearance of photos, their ability to fix photos that were not well taken in the first place is limited. Phota Labs takes a different approach by focusing on correcting "the act of shooting itself" while preserving the natural appearance of the people in the image.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Zhang said: "Phota is your personal photo assistant. It can even generate better photos for every moment you want to preserve before you even speak, which means it offers a very proactive experience. You can think of it as a photographer, or a virtual photographer, that reviews your album, tries to understand what happened at the time, and imagines how it would take that photo if it were there on the scene."

The core idea is to use AI to modify photos, such as turning a wide-angle group photo into a more compact portrait, or converting a selfie into a photo taken from a normal perspective.

Users can choose from different photography styles, which will determine how AI processes the images. The range includes slight adjustments to retain the original shot and composition, to adding fish-eye lenses, alternative angles, and even more drastic transformations with completely different perspectives.

Although some people use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to enhance or edit images, these tools often change the appearance of the people depicted, especially when dealing with blurry photos, as they do not know what the person actually looks like.

Zhang means: "For Phota, we have developed our own technology. We have created this personalized technology that can actually learn the identity characteristics of individuals and preserve these characteristics whenever we make any transformations to the photos."

Xia represents: "We have an obsession with authenticity. I believe that connecting AI with real moments and ensuring that these photos are, in a sense, flawless is of great value. This is also why we have invested a lot of research into understanding individual contexts and building this identity model, because we want to ensure that these photos are genuine. They are just better photos of the same moment, rather than making people think, 'Oh, this is a AI image.'"

Xia said that beta users were very happy to see that the moments they had truly experienced were now available in a better version, and they regarded the results as photos of their real memories, rather than images generated by AI. The two founders noticed that users took more photos because they knew they could use Phota Labs to enhance them later on.

Zhang said, "We are turning something that was originally unusable into something that users are willing to print out. Those who love photography but have never really dealt with editing can now experience a professional quality that was simply impossible in the past. So, I think this is of great significance to us. There are so many memorable moments captured in photos, and we truly hope that they can be meaningful and become something you can remember."

In terms of financing, the company completed a $5.6 million seed round of financing last year, led by a16z.

Phota Labs is currently launched as a free app to build an initial user base, with plans to explore free value-added models later on. This startup also intends to launch the Android app in the future.