PicsArt, the popular image-editing and photo-social-networking app continues to reinvent itself, adding AI-enhanced art filters like those popularized by the Prisma app, which can transform mobile photos, giving them the appearance of bona fide artworks by masters like Picasso or Mondrian. Alongside this addition, this iPhone app has undergone a clarifying redesign and now features a more appealing price structure: You no longer have to pay to remove ads. But perhaps PicsArt's most original contribution is the concept of remixing photos and drawings.

Getting Started

PicsArt is available for Android, iOS, and as a Windows Univeral app for mobile and desktop; I tested it on my iPhone 6s. It's a not insubstantial 153MB download, so make sure you clean out your phone's storage. As mentioned, the app is free to use, and there's a good selection of free content, but there are in-app purchases for clipart sets, stickers, fonts, and frames, most of which cost 99 cents or $1.99. You can start to get a feel for what PicsArt can do without even creating an account—a trait I like in any app I'm testing.

Interface

The latest PicsArt update gets a lighter, cleaner, less-cluttered look, though it still encompasses a wealth of editing tools. The Home screen is your social photo feed, which you swipe down just like you can in Instagram. Following other users takes just a button tap, and you can heart, comment on, repost, or remix the image, if the poster has included the #FreeToEdit hashtag. If the blue Remix pencil button shows a number, you can tap it to see other users' remixes of the image at hand.

Hitting the magenta Plus sign button lets you add your own image, either from the phone camera, the Camera Roll, or by starting a drawing on a blank canvas. You can also start creating a collage from the Plus sign. Your Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram photos are also potential starting points for your PicsArt creations.

You can pinch to zoom, reveal more controls with a plus button, see before and after views of your image, undo the last action, and reset your picture to its original state. Every effect offers adjustability via sliders and a brush that lets choose where to apply or remove the effect.

Tools include curves, masks, clone/stamp, cropping with shape, brushes, borders, text and lens flares. Photoshop, watch out! And don't even get me started about clip art. There are sets for travel, sports, nature, birthday, mustaches, baby, love, rabbits…the list goes on and on.

Drawing tools also push the app into Photoshop territory, with more than 20 brush types and shapes that transform on a 3D plane. You can adjust the opacity, size, and even the "squish" for the marker brush. You get 30 font choices for text overlays, use a color picker and adjust the size to taste with a handle. You can start a drawing with or without a photo background, and the feature supports Photoshop-style layers.

Of course you also get red-eye correction, tooth whitening, stamp-and-clone, and blemish removal. The blemish tool did a good job on minor skin issues. One thing you don't get—at least not as powerfully as in Adobe Mix and Photoshop Touch—is auto-object selection and edge detection. For example, when I brushed artificial tan onto a friend's face, the brown overlay affected the background as well as his skin. The cloning tool is fun, but don't expect content-aware object removal like that in Adobe's Photoshop and Mix.

Magic Effects

Prisma may have popularized AI-powered filters that turn your photos into works of art, but PicsArt's Magic Effects have a trick not possible in Prisma: You can apply them to just a selected area of a photo. So you could have a model's eyes look natural, while everything else looks like it stepped out of a Mondrian painting.

PicsArt applies its Magic Effects using your phone's local processing. This means that, unlike with Prisma, you don't need an Internet connection to use it. But do note that, since they are highly processing-intensive, they take longer to render than most photo filters. In my testing, they averaged about 15-20 seconds to finish. That's about the same time it takes to apply Prisma filters. But another advantage of this approach over a cloud-processing system like that used by Prisma is that you'll never get "server overloaded" messages.

When applying Magic Effects, you also get a choice of blending modes reminiscent of those used by Photoshop layers. So you can choose Normal, Multiply, ColorBurn, Darken, Lighten, Screen, Overlay, SoftLight, HardLight, and Difference blending modes. It's fun to try these out, but I find that the default setting often looks best. Prisma offers more basic art styles—30 compared with PicsArt's 10—and some of those are more impressive than PicsArt's, though company representatives told me that more would be added.

Collages

Collages aren't possible with most photo social apps, but PicsArt offers a cornucopia of layouts, borders, and backgrounds for collage creation, as you can see in the image below.

Sharing

The app's wealth of editing tools means you can put serious time into working on an image. You can save the picture to the Camera Roll at any point with a button tap, but naturally you'll want to share that work with others, and the app is by no means deficient in sharing options. Facebook, email, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger sharing are built in, and when uploading to PicsArt's own service you have options to simultaneously share to Facebook and Dropbox. When uploading an image, you can add keyword tags and location.

The app—and the PicsArt website for that matter—allows all the standard social networking activities; commenting, favoriting, and following. The interface is well-designed and intuitive, making good use of swipe gestures.

Contests are a nice plus from PicsArt, and they make sense, given the numerous creative tools the app offers. Users vote, and the winners are highlighted on PicsArt's blog.

The Formula for PicsArt's Success

PicsArt takes just about the opposite approach to photo enhancing from, say, Instagram. Where the latter stresses simplicity, PicsArt offers vastly more image-editing options. Not only are its filters more adjustable, but it offers near-Photoshop-level tools like layers, clone stamp, curves, and masks. Drawing tools and clip art make it far more than just a photo app. All of this, however, comes with a risk of over-modified, unnatural photos, which Instagram does a good job of preventing by limiting the options and the extent to which those options can affect images.

Those who love to tinker with photos on their phones and jazz them up to the hilt should probably dump Instagram for PicsArt. Or at least use PicsArt to edit before sharing photos to Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, and the rest. But they may just find enough like-minded image makers on PicsArt's own robust social network to satisfy their needs. PicsArt is a clear PCMag Editors' Choice, but for a larger community and some pretty nifty photo tools of their own, try fellow iPhone social-photo-app Editors' Choices, Flickr and Instagram.