As Cool As I Am

Getting Started With As Cool As I Am

I keep meaning to write this down properly since I get asked about it constantly at work. As Cool As I Am is a mobile app that lets you apply custom filters and effects to your photos and videos. It launched a few years ago and has steadily built up a community of creators who share their own presets. The basic version is free, but the paid tier unlocks the full library of effects and gives you export options without watermarks. What makes it worth using isn't the default filters — those are fine but nothing special. It's the user-generated preset marketplace and the raw editing layer underneath. You can adjust individual channels, add grain, play with exposure curves, and stack multiple effects together. That last part is where people usually hit snags.

Why As Cool As I Am Won't Work For Everything

I ran into a real problem recently working on a project for a client. They wanted a specific warm, vintage look applied consistently across forty photos taken in different lighting conditions. The app's auto-match feature handled about half of them decently, but the other half came out completely wrong — washed out or with incorrect color balance because the source images had wildly different white points. What I ended up doing was manually setting the white balance on each photo first before applying the preset. It took longer, maybe twenty minutes extra for the batch, but the results were actually consistent. The app doesn't do batch correction before filter application, and that's a known limitation nobody really talks about. The free version exports at a reduced resolution. If you're just posting to social media it probably doesn't matter, but if you need the files for print or web use at full size, you'll run into issues. The pro subscription removes that cap and adds PNG export, which matters if you're doing any kind of post-processing in another tool afterward. JPEG compression at the free tier's limit introduces visible artifacts on darker portions of your image. I learned that the hard way on a job where the client needed the files for a print run and complained about banding in the shadows. Switching to pro-level export fixed it immediately. You can download As Cool As I Am from the iOS App Store or Google Play Store. Search for the official listing — there are a handful of knockoff apps with similar names that I'd strongly recommend avoiding. The real one is from the developer called Prism Labs. Make sure you're getting the right app by checking the developer name and reading recent reviews, since the fake versions tend to have worse ratings and fewer features than they claim.

The official website at ascoolasiam.app has a download page with links to both stores and also lists the pricing for the subscription. There's a seven-day free trial on the pro plan, which is enough time to test whether the advanced features are worth it for your workflow. I'd suggest taking advantage of that before committing.

Alternatives Worth Considering

If As Cool As I Am doesn't fit what you need, VSCO and RNI Films are solid alternatives with similar preset ecosystems. Lightroom Mobile is better if you want more control over individual adjustment parameters rather than relying on stacked filters. None of them do exactly what this app does, so it depends on whether you value speed and ease of use or precision and flexibility. The biggest thing to understand before diving in is that this app rewards experimentation but punishes assumptions. Don't expect presets to work perfectly out of the box on every image. Adjust your source material first, then apply the effect. That's the pattern that works.