Paint your photos into masterpieces with this app

Now, turn your smartphone photos into the beautiful work of arts with this iPhone app.

Now, turn your smartphone photos into the beautiful work of arts with this iPhone app.

Developed by the Brooklyn-based firm Tinybop, the app named Waterlogue simulates the actual painting process.

With Waterlogue, the developers tried to write algorithms that approached images as a human would.

How does it work?

Waterlogue starts by distilling pictures into lines.

It then boils those down to the ones that a person might actually draw - simplifying the image from a thousand tiny lines.

It creates each painting layer by layer, as a real artist would.

The app now simulates the spreading and bleeding of the pigment onto the canvas - with dedicated properties for the virtual paper, the pigment, the brushes, the water and so on.

"Through the process of tweaking the software, I would eliminate or reduce any marks that did not look like they were made by a sane individual," John Balestrieri, one of its developers, was quoted as saying on wired.com.

According to Balestrieri, his painting algorithms are the most advanced he has found in any commercial product.