From 2D to 3D Photo Editing – imgly

Last November, we released Portrait, an iOS app that helps create amazing, stylized selfies and portraits instantly. With over a million downloads and many more portrait images created, we had a nice confirmation of our vision. The central component of Portrait is an AI that is trained to clip portraits from the background, a technique we are eager to further improve and refine. In fact, Portrait helped us to explore a novel technique for image editing, as we were able to leverage a new powerful data set in photography: depth data. We began feeding our AI models with the depth data from the iPhone Xs TrueDepth camera and had one goal in mind: to infer depth information for portrait imagery, or bringing three-dimensionality into a two-dimensional photo.