PicsArt Transforms Your Smartphone Pictures Into Works of Art

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Name: PicsArt

One-Liner Pitch: An all-in-one photo editor and photo-art community app.

Why It's Taking Off: PicsArt has more editing options than most photo apps, allowing users to develop creative and artistic images.

Photo filters have been a hot topic this week, with both Twitter and Flickr adding filters to their apps -- presumably in an effort to take on Instagram. But there's another photo app out there that also offers a wide selection of filters and a significant community of users.

PicsArt, a free app for Android, offers more editing options than most photo apps to transform your pictures into detailed, professional-looking works of art. It has been downloaded more than 30 million times since launching a little more than a year ago and is currently top photo app on Android. The company is planning to release an app for iPhone early next year, which may just give other photo apps on the platform a run for their money.

With PicsArt, users can choose images from the camera roll on their phone, Facebook, Flickr,
Picasa, Google, Dropbox, or take a new photo with the PicsArt app. Once they have a photo, that's where all the possibilities begin. They can crop their photos into shapes, change eye colors, add callouts, digital stickers and clipart, or customize their photos using PicsArts' main features:

• Filters: Choose from a range of filters, including comic, watercolor, sketcher, smart
  blur, oil, popart, paper stencilers, distortions and color splashes

• Masks: Enliven photos with bright and vivid colors and blends

• Corrections: Fix a face, hide blemishes or add a tan to someone's complexion

• Frames: Choose from more than 50 fun-themed frames from different categories

• Borders: Customize your own borders

Don't like the way your photo turned out? PicsArt makes it simple to erase all of your changes and start from scratch, or you can use the "Draw" feature to create your own pictures using brushes, shapes and colors.

"PicsArt is a creative tool that empowers people to discover their inner artist," Artavazd Mehrabyan, co-founder and CTO of PicsArt, told Mashable in an interview. "With so many options and artistic tools, you can never stop working on an image because you are discovering new things all the time."

After you're done editing, PicsArt gives you the option to upload your new images directly from the app to a number of social sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Dropbox, Foursquare, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress and devianART. You can also add photos to the PicsArt community, which, similar to Instagram, has an ongoing feed of photos from users who you can follow or who can follow you.

PicsArt is self-funded and the business model is to monetize through advertisements within the app.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Manny Valdes and PicsArt