Recently, Remini, a highly personalized AI retouching software, has been frantically swiping the screen on major social platforms, and people have not only put clay-style filters on their travel check-in photos and selfies, but also celebrities, classic pictures of film and television works, and emojis.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ Metaverse Scavengers
Users only need to upload an image, and they can use Remini's clay style filter to convert the image into the corresponding clay-style filter with AI technology. For example, the well-known "Brother Black Fly", "Old Man in the Metro", "Zhen Huan", and "Hong Shixian" have all been reshaped by AI and injected with clay souls. In addition to being funny, the transformed picture can also better restore the charm of the original picture.
It is very appropriate to use "ugly cute" to describe the style of pictures, but the pictures are a little ugly, but the traffic is really high. On social platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, there are millions of clicks on topics related to clay filters, and there are also many people with tens of millions of clicks.
It is no exaggeration to say that a national "self-blackening and ugly" contest is in full swing.
Domestic AI is popular all over the world, and the free one is the most expensive
With the help of the May Day holiday, Remini downloads soared, not only surpassing Douyin Speed Edition and Quark, but even directly rushing to the top of the domestic iOS free APP download list, and dominating the list for several days, becoming the first domestic generative AI product to explode this year.
Source: AppStore
Although Remini is on the list of free iOS app downloads, it does not mean that it provides long-term free services. Currently, Remini offers a one-week free trial for new users, after which you will be charged per plan. The Pro version package is 548 yuan a year, providing access to mobile phones and computers, and supporting the processing of video files; The lite version of the package is 228 yuan a year, and only the picture enhancement function is unlocked.
The price of the Remini Pro version package is not cheap, and the annual fee of 548 yuan is converted to 68 yuan a week. For comparison, ChatGPT membership costs about 34 yuan per week, which means that the price of Remini is twice that of ChatGPT. The high price dissuaded many users, and some users who tried the Remini made it clear that they would not continue to pay after the trial period.
On the one hand, the price of similar AI products on the market is much higher than that of similar AI products on the market, which scares away some users who are still waiting. On the other hand, many users are attracted by clay filters to download Remini, and they are not interested in other features such as photo enhancement, and Remini's official pricing naturally includes this part of the service. In this way, users will inevitably have a psychological gap, and a single clay filter is obviously difficult to support the package price of 68 yuan/week.
While most people choose to stay away because of the price, some smart people have taken advantage of the information gap to embark on the road to riches. A large number of clay filter products have emerged on the e-commerce trading platform, and the price of a single picture ranges from 5 cents to 1 yuan, and some merchants even sell Remini's download and installation methods. Xiao Lei pondered that this thing is not free to download, the angle of the pit is novel, I advise everyone to know more before following the trend of new things, otherwise it is easy to suffer.
Source: Xianyu
Back to the product itself, looking at the pictures of novel and funny clay filters, I believe that friends who have never used Remini are already a little itchy. Don't worry, Xiao Lei, let's take you to see how much magic Remini has? What is the difference between the clay filter and other products such as the Meitu App and Xiaohongshu?
Remini clay images are full of texture, and the Meitu App wins in terms of cost performance
Remini's AI clay gameplay is very simple, find the Clay Filter on the homepage of the APP, select the image and click upload, and wait for about 10s-30s to generate a clay-style picture.
The filter has no requirements for the content of the picture,AIThe technology can identify real people、Landscapes、Animals and anime characters,But the success rate of AI is not 100%,Xiaolei has tested it many times,Occasionally, there will still be recognition errors。
Source: Remini
In order to intuitively reflect the strength of Remini, Xiaolei found the Meitu App and Xiaohongshu, and the three will filter and beautify the same image. (Ps. Due to the difference in the form of generation, the finished film of Xiaohongshu will be displayed in the final stage)
The first is a picture of a person, the size of the clay picture generated by Remini is(1712*2560) The size is increased on the basis of the original picture, which highly restores the shadows and folds of the character's face, hair and clothes, and the background recognition is also consistent with the original picture, and the overall effect is quite good.
Source: Remini (original image on the left, new image on the right)
The Meitu App has the opposite size strategy for generating clay images, with the new image being only 682*1024, which is even lower than the original image. The shrinkage of the size affects the quality of the picture, and the details of the characters are much weaker than those of the Remini, and the details are not bright enough to make up, and the brightened characters lose the naturalness of the original picture. I won't go into details about the background, because the Meitu App directly recognized the error and automatically changed the background, which was quite fatal, at least in Xiaolei, which deducted a lot of points.
Source: The Meitu App (original image on the left, new image on the right)
The second is an animal picture, and the size logic is the same as the first picture, and I won't repeat it later. Let's take a look at the effect directly, the remodeled horse is instantly cute, the sideburns and other details are basically restored in place, and the overall tone of the picture has been adjusted to be more vibrant.
Of course, the disadvantages are also obvious, first of all, the horse's eyes are in the wrong position, which looks a little sluggish; Secondly, the tattooed arm of the keeper next door was identified as a sleeve, and the fence material was forcibly turned into a wooden board. Other than that, the overall effect of the picture is quite acceptable.
Source: Remini (original image on the left, new image on the right)
The outrageous Meitu App continues, and it directly staged a good show of "pointing a horse as a dog", and a good horse in the original picture was directly turned into a dog by AI. The effect of other details is passable, at least the color tone has not changed, and the background fence material and the breeder's tattoo recognition are correct, which is better than the Remini.
From the perspective of the effect of sideburns, the difference in AI processing logic between Remini and the Meitu App is very obvious.
Source: The Meitu App (original image on the left, new image on the right)
The third is an anime picture,This time, the size difference between the Remini generated picture and the original picture is a bit big,After testing, as long as it is a picture of the same proportion,The size of the final picture generated by Remini is about the same,It will not change because of the size of the original picture。
In terms of effect, the Remini version of Wukong looks like a wooden man, without the charm of the original picture, and there are different degrees of identification errors in the clothes and background, but the overall can still be seen to be specific anime characters.
Source: Remini (original image on the left, new image on the right)
The Meitu App's handling of this image is much better than that of Remini, and the features of the characters and backgrounds are basically restored in place. If you really want to talk about the shortcomings, it may be that the so-called "clay feeling" is insufficient, lacking a trace of texture.
Source: The Meitu App (original image on the left, new image on the right)
Xiaohongshu's clay filter is generated in the form of a video by default, and Xiaolei converts the video into a GIF for everyone to watch at one time. Although the quality of the GIF has been compressed, the clarity of the images generated by the Xiaohongshu clay filter cannot be compared with that of Remini and the Meitu App.
Source: Little Red Book
After reading the finished products of the clay filters of the three products, I believe you know which is better and which is worse. In Xiaolei's heart, Remini ranks first, whether it is the clarity of the picture, the texture, or the restoration accuracy are far ahead.
The Meitu App is in second place, not that the filter effect of the Meitu App is not as good as that of Remini, but that there is a difference in the AI processing logic between the two.
As for Xiaohongshu, after all, it is not a platform specializing in AI generation, and the clay filters provided are only convenient for users to entertain and share, and the effect is not good, but at least it is convenient to use. What's more, any product evaluation is inseparable from cost performance, and Xiaohongshu clay filters are free to use.
As mentioned above, the Meitu App is now charging for features that were originally free, but the price is much cheaper than Remini. It is also a 7-day free trial, and after the expiration of the trial period, it costs 128 yuan/year for continuous annual subscription, about 16 yuan per week. If you're just trying something new, be sure to cancel your subscription before the trial ends, or you'll be wasting money.
热度转瞬即逝？Remini还能火多久
In 2019, Beijing Damu Technology Co., Ltd. founded Remini, which at this time was only an AI product for the restoration of old photos for overseas markets. Subsequently, Remini was acquired by the Italian Internet company Bending Spoons, and iterated new features such as picture enhancement, AI photo generation, and baby AI generator, which eventually became what we see now.
Remini has become popular in the U.S. market as early as mid-2023 and topped the overall U.S. App Store list, earlier than the domestic market. Despite the soaring popularity, Remini also faces the same problem as Face Meng, ZAO, and Miao Ya cameras, that is, it is difficult to retain users for short-term products that rely on a single function to get out of the circle.
Source: Miao Duck Camera
The novelty brought by product features will always pass, especially for features with low technical barriers. When Xiaolei searched for clay filters, he found that there are many apps on the market that focus on clay filters, which shows that the threshold for this technology is not high.
Secondly, Remini's pricing is quite high, and when other software launches free or low-cost homogeneous features, it is difficult for Remini to be different from other apps even if it can be personalized in terms of effect. Users are all aiming for AI clay filters, and they can basically play all the pictures in a few days after trying it, and how many users are rushing to use it for a long time? Even if there is a temporary demand, I can get it for 1 or 2 yuan when I go to Xianyu, so why buy a package.
Therefore, the probability of Remini's explosion is short-lived, and this time it is brought about by the combination of innovative AI generation technology + holiday social sharing demand + low entry threshold for free trial, which can be said to have taken advantage of the right time and place. For C-end generative AI products, how to retain users and achieve commercialization with short-term popularity is the key, perhaps one new feature after another, or marketing on social platforms......
All in all, it's not easy for Remini to stay on the fire, and if it doesn't bring new excitement to users, it's likely to be just a flash in the pan in the history of AI.