Instagram’s New Photo Editing Tool Lets You Pixelate Your Partner

Instagram has announced a new feature for “soft launching” a relationship. It’s called the Pixel effect, and it can cut a person out of a photo and pixelate them.

The AI-powered tool is for Instagram Stories and can be found under the Restyle effects. In a post announcing the Pixel effect, Instagram demonstrates that it can be used under the “Write a prompt” section.

Essentially, the user writes a long-winded prompt asking the AI to cut out a subject and pixelate them. It’s something that a skilled photo editor would do in the past and in recent years is done very quickly in apps like Photoshop. Now, thanks to the power of AI, cutting out and putting an effect on a subject is available to anyone and everyone.

“Use the Pixel effect in Stories and edit the prompt to call out what you want pixelated — like ‘the person on the right.’ Swipe to see the exact wording we used to try it yourself,” Instagram says.

Soft-Launching a Relationship

If you’ve never soft-launched a relationship on social media, you might be a bit confused about what it means. It’s a modern dating trend where you hint that you are dating someone without revealing the identity of the person.

It’s become a trend among celebrities. Katy Perry soft-launched her relationship with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the most subtle of ways last year when he appeared for a millisecond at the back of a video the pop singer posted to Instagram showing her celebrating her 41st birthday. It was even more of an Easter egg given the video was tucked away in a carousel of photos.

Instagram’s Pixel feature has been criticized by some people online as silly. “Why post a relationship no one asked you to post if you’re gonna be doing all that?” asks one person on X.

Others, including Mashable, point out that it raises questions about how Meta stores the pictures of people who aren’t showing their faces online, since the pixelation happens in the app.

But aside from soft-launching a relationship, it could be a useful feature to blur a child’s face or a stranger who happens to be in the background of a picture.

Image creditsHeader photo licensed via Depositphotos.