EASELHow we ended up with 111 looks
A hundred looks is only useful if you can find the one you want. Most of the work in the catalogue was deciding what to leave out.
The catalogue sits in eleven categories: Portrait, Places, Art, Cartoon, Toys, Eras, Makeover, Fun, Seasonal, Film and Restore. They exist because a flat list of a hundred names is unusable — you scroll it once, give up, and tap whichever one you happened to stop on.
The rule for getting in
A look earns its place only if you can tell it from its neighbours without rendering both. That sounds obvious and it removed a lot of candidates. "Oil painting" and "classical oil portrait" are different ideas to whoever wrote them and the same picture to everyone else.
It is also why every look carries a blurb of three or four words under its name — Simple grey background, In a bright office. The blurb is not decoration. It is there so that the difference between two neighbouring looks is legible before you spend anything.
Looks that need a person
Most looks restyle whatever is in front of them and work as well on a dog, a street or a plate of food. A few are meaningless without a person: they either render a face specifically, or they keep the people and replace everything around them.
Those ones are marked, and the app hides them when it does not find a face — rather than cheerfully offering to put a sandwich on the Moon. The flag is deliberately narrow. Over-applying it would shrink the catalogue for no reason every time the photo was of something other than a person.
Every example is real
Each look in the app shows a sample before you choose it, and every one of those samples is Easel's own output, made through the same pipeline you would be using. They are all the same person, so the comparison between two looks is a fair one. None of them is stock art, and none has been retouched after the fact.
The same set is on the looks page here, all 111 of them, filterable by category.
It can change without an app update
The catalogue lives on the server rather than inside the app, so a look can be added, retired or improved without waiting on a release. When the prompt behind a look changes in a way that alters the output, its version is bumped — which means the next tap re-renders rather than handing you the old picture from the cache.