Prisma

Prisma is a small art app for the browser. An image is sent through a chain of effects such as kaleidoscope, stripes, blur or glitch. Each effect has its own sliders, and each step builds on the result of the previous one. The app is a single page that runs entirely in the browser and needs no account and no installation. Your images never leave your computer.

Idea & philosophy

It began with two small single pages: a kaleidoscope and a StripArt generator. Each did exactly one thing to an image. What makes such effects exciting, though, only appears when you combine them. A kaleidoscope over a blurred image looks different from one over a sharp image, and a single strip from a photo turns into something new with a swirl and a colour shift. Prisma turns this into a tool for experimenting: you stack effects one after another, see at each step what it does to the image, and can go back at any time or change a step in the middle. Four guiding ideas carry the app. Playful rather than technical: operation runs through icons, preview images and handles directly on the image, explanations sit in tooltips, and the dice and “Surprise me” invite discovery. Understandable even with long chains: the filmstrip shows every intermediate state as its own image, and new effects are only a draft until a deliberate tick adds them to the chain. Working directly on the image: row, column, stripe area, swirl centre or crop are chosen on the image, and number fields are only for fine tuning. Light, free and extensible: new effects can be added as a plugin in a few lines, and every chain can be saved and shared as a small file. That makes a “look” something you can pass on. Prisma belongs under art and culture because it turns photos into new visual worlds and puts the joy of trying things out at the centre.

Contents & features

• Effect chain with a filmstrip: every step as a preview, reorder by dragging, show and hide, remove
• Around 17 effects in four groups: Basics (colour, pop, crop), Patterns (kaleidoscope, stripes, tiles, mirror, polar), Distort (row/column, trail, wave, swirl, glitch, pixel sorting) and Look (blur, mosaic, vignette & grain)
• New effects first appear as a draft and only join the chain once confirmed
• Source window: choose a position, centre or mirror axis directly on the image
• Undo and redo, dice for random values and “Surprise me” for a random chain
• Load an image by file, drag and drop, paste or address; zoom, pan and compare with the original
• Save, load and share chains as a small file
• Export as PNG, JPG or WebP at 1080, 2K or 4K, with the chain recalculated at full resolution
• Your own effects as a plugin (JavaScript file), with an example in the app folder
• Operation by mouse, touch and keyboard, with no backend and no libraries

Status

The app is embedded directly on this site and runs entirely in the browser. No images and no data are transmitted. Plugins run with all rights of the page, so only load files you trust.

Launch Prisma ↗