The Meitu photo app can turn sports figures into filtered dreams

If you’ve hung around social media this week, you may have seen people posting photos of themselves, but the photos are enhanced with wrinkle-free digital makeup and elegant backgrounds, transforming them into dream-like, algorithm-based illustrations. They’re all using an app called Meitu — it’s been around for years, but it seems like people in the U.S. recently found out about its existence. If you’re interested, you can download it for free on iOS and Android. Just follow these instructions that New York Magazine wrote out, and your photo will end up looking dreamier than real life.

It’s a fascinating app for the obvious reason that, much like Japan’s purikura booths, it turns your ordinary photos and selfies into ethereal Chinese illustrations. But you might be wondering where the sports angle is in all this. Well, even though the app exclusively uses selfies, you can also go into your phone’s photos and upload a head shot, provided that the photo’s big enough to enhance and there’s a head to detect. I tried to use it on a Pillsbury Doughboy plush, and it wouldn’t work, sadly. It worked on the botched Jesus Fresco, though.

So, you know where I’m going with this: I used the Meitu app on head shots of sports figures. Here’s what happened:

Belichick’s most famous characteristic is his curmudgeonly facial expressions. That ... still exists in his filtered Meitu form.

The meme itself could not be detected by the app, because the perspective of that photo is angled, so I went with an alternate shot with the “Mermaid” filter that has tear bubbles.

I sincerely apologize for this one.

Alright, Harbaugh actually looks adorable here.

And Popovich looks adorable here, too. In fact, a lot of the photos I ran through the Meitu app turned out alright ...

... OK, maybe not The Rock.

One more thing: You can run your enhanced photo through the app as many times as you want — until it becomes unrecognizable. (Thanks to writer Laura Hudson for the tip.) This is what happened when I used that method on the aforementioned image of Coach Pop.

(h/t Select All; The Verge)