Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The beauty software of "East Asian witchcraft" just sees through human nature.

Some time ago, a young man in 1997 became a new generation of stalk king because of his rugged temperament during the live broadcast and the background picture of the beautiful scenery.

This scene can't help but make me want to sing, "the figure is real, the person is fake, there is no persistence." . "

Then again, it is rumored that there are four great witchcraft in Asia: Thai transgender surgery, Korean cosmetic surgery, Japanese cosmetic surgery, and Chinese graphic revision.

And the artifact that will carry forward the magic art of revising pictures belongs to Meitu.

As the most popular image processing tool in China, Meitu allows many users to witness the magical effect of turning decay into magic brought by one-button beauty.

To some extent, it can also be said that it is its "filter + beauty" function that has opened an era of national online celebrities.

In this issue, I would like to take Meitu as a clue to talk about China's "history of beauty painting".

01 for the post-80s and 90s, the big-head sticker is the earliest form of selfie.

Big head paste originated in Japan in 1995, was introduced into China at the turn of the century, and entered a period of rapid development around 2004.

At that time, there were one or two small shops near our primary school, which also sold a lot of stationery toys, which both boys and girls liked to go to. There were machines with stickers in the store at that time. So for a period of time, the pencil-boxes and notebooks of the girls in the class were taken with the big heads of their girlfriends.

I remember that the big-head sticker at that time also provided a variety of colorful and dreamy filters, and even a variety of star-themed filters for the first generation of star-chasing girls to take pictures with stars. In the pencil box of my deskmate, there was a big head sticker, and next to her was the most popular F4 Zhou Yumin.

Those pose who play handsome or pretend to be sad, as well as non-mainstream aesthetics flashing pink bubbles, dominate a generation's childhood.

Later, after everyone had computers and learned to play QQ, similar non-mainstream aesthetics occupied Qzone.

In the era of non-mainstream popularity, Martian, as the lingua franca at that time, not only occupied our Qzone, but even the picture frames pasted with big heads were covered with all kinds of sentimental Martian essays.

The pushing hand of Mars text is called Wu Xinhong. As a post-80s who was born in 1981, Wu Xinhong made excellent grades from an early age and loved painting, but he did not follow the usual path: he chose to suspend school in high school and went directly to the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts for further study, and later gave up the opportunity to go to university and chose to start his own business.

Wu Xinhong in 2007, Wu Xinhong seized the "non-mainstream" network communication needs of the post-90s generation at that time, and took the team three days to make a Martian converter. Without any publicity, the Martian converter attracted 40 to 50 million users in a year.

Obviously, the biggest reason for its success is that it meets the personalized consumer psychology and consumer needs of the post-90s at that time.

After the fire, Wu Xinhong has been thinking about what to do. He is keenly aware that in addition to word communication, the new generation of young people are more and more inclined to socialize with pictures.

Because in his search for information related to "non-mainstream", he found that the search volume of "non-mainstream avatar" and "non-mainstream picture" remains high, which undoubtedly represents a huge market: people on the Internet, more and more need a good-looking picture to advertise themselves.

But at that time, there were not many picture processing software in China, and only professional Photoshop and light and shadow magic hands could be named. Among them, PS is the most authoritative and functional, but the operation steps are relatively tedious and unfriendly to most non-professionals.

Wu Xinhong decided to make a fool-like image processing software that everyone can use, in short, to PS, to make an extremely simplified version of the software.

In October 2008, a simplified version of PS, developed by a team led by Wu Xinhong, was successfully launched and was initially named "Meitu Master". In 2009, Wu Xinhong changed the slightly serious name of "Master Meitu" to "Meitu".

Celebrate! Meitu, the king of the beautiful map world, was born!

02 Why can "Meitu" beat a number of competitors and finally reach the top of the art world? I think there are some elements that have to be mentioned.

The core reason is that "Meitu" is stupid enough to understand the needs of core users extremely deeply.

From the very beginning, Master Meitu carried out the principle of simplification to the end.

In addition to cutting, rotating, modifying dimensions and other basic functions, there are only a few basic filters, such as classic LOMO, soft light, aesthetic, recall, retro, black and white … ..

After changing its name, "Meitu" came online with richer filter functions, including the popular Ah Bao color.

If the success of Photoshop lies in its creative transformation of the original physical properties of the "filter" into computer software, the definition of "P map" this thing.

So the victory of "Meitu" lies in that it understands one thing: consumers do not need a powerful image modification tool, they just need a good-looking filter and effect. So it packages the filters and effects into products and sells them to consumers.

After all, in the Internet era, although we all have the need to beautify pictures, but in reality, not many people are really patient, in order to repair a picture, specifically to learn PS.

Again, human nature is lazy in nature, there is inertia, the same thing, will certainly choose the more convenient one.

Meitu extremely simplified the tedious operation of ps, but also to meet everyone's basic needs, a good solution to this pain point.

In addition, Meitu has also achieved the extreme in the perceptual value of his own products. After all, when people use or consume a product, they not only like its function, but also hope that it can meet their psychological and social needs.

As far as beautifying the picture is concerned, people not only hope that the composition, tone and filter of this photo will look good, but also hope that the people in the photo will look good, too. Especially many female friends, especially when this picture is still a selfie.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to look more beautiful. In fact, the pursuit of beauty is also one of the eternal driving forces for the development of human civilization.

Meitu really ushered in a breakthrough development, it is after its continuous strengthening of the "portrait beauty" function.

Another key element is that the node where "Meitu" was born is very interesting.

In 2010, Jobs released iPhone 4. In addition to the 5-megapixel rear camera, the iPhone4 also has a 300-megapixel front-facing camera, which was originally designed to facilitate video calls, but has invisibly ushered in a new era of mobile selfies.

In early 2011, Meitu's App version officially landed on the mobile client. Following the trend of smartphones and the mobile Internet, its App version makes a fuss about "beauty" in addition to basically copying the basic functions of the web version.

From the initial "whitening, freckle, acne, face and weight loss, dark circles under the eyes, eyes magnification" five major functions, to later achieve "one-button beauty", and then to continue to expand, refine more beauty details, and open the beauty selfie, real-time beauty and other functions.

In the pursuit of beauty, Meitu can be said to spare no effort to refine and update the function of portrait beauty.

At the same time, that stage is also a period of enthusiastic development of domestic social media platforms. Weibo, which has the big V effect of stars, is in full swing, and Wechat moments are in the ascendant. People are no longer limited to QQ-style acquaintances, but prefer to get attention and appreciation from others on these social platforms, and Meitu's photos are the best content presentation.

Based on algorithms and media, Meitu is invincible all over the world for the core demand of "beauty".

03 I said earlier that the products of "Meitu" are "filter" and "effect".

But let's go a little deeper, in essence, Meitu's product is "beauty", and behind its algorithm, a whole set of standards about beauty.

This set of standards perfectly fits the eyeball economy of the era of online celebrities.

If people in the early days turned themselves into "photo fraud" simply because they were accustomed to the Truman world created by "filter + Beauty" and just wanted to enjoy the praise of others and make themselves happier, then, with the rise of live broadcasting, "online celebrity faces" brings visible economic benefits.

For example, since 2014, models like Zhang Dayi on Taobao have become the representatives of the first generation of online celebrities by means of live streaming; all kinds of games, entertainment live broadcasts and later live streaming that began to flourish around 2016 have become popular with a large number of online celebrities.

Obviously, on a mobile phone with a video in a few seconds, a good-looking Internet celebrity face and an elaborate consumption scene are the ones that can attract people's attention in a short period of time.

To some extent, it is "filter + Beauty" that creates the conditions for these online celebrities to become famous, which sets the tone of the era of online celebrities: you can't just look at the face, but the face is really an important factor that can't be ignored.

This is more obvious in the current era of short videos. In the short video, no one can escape the blessing of all kinds of filters and beauty. Even now these platforms come with all kinds of other bizarre special effects, such as beauty, in order to attract people quickly.

And who can attract more people, who can have more clicks, who is the traffic king of the short video era.

So, why didn't Meitu rule the short video era?

Speaking of which, Wu Xinhong actually launched a short video product called Meipai as early as 2014.

Just like Meitu's beauty as the selling point, there are all kinds of filters and watermarks on the early beauty auction, so you can merge your own content into a short video of about 10 seconds.

Thanks to the light of Meitu, Meipai was also very popular after its launch, with the number of monthly active users reaching 150 million at one point.

However, no matter how hot the beauty shot was at that time, it has long been silent now. In recent years, Meitu is also facing the challenge of being light-faced, awakening, and so on.

Meitu faces the same crisis as it did when it seized power from Photoshop.

With the further popularity of the mobile Internet and the further evolution of tool technology, "becoming beautiful", which originally required a special App, has become the basic configuration of all App. Douyin Kuaishou can beauty, a variety of cameras App can also beauty, and even many domestic mobile phone brands, the original cameras have a certain beauty effect.

Meitu once exported a set of "beauty standards", but now it can no longer monopolize this standard.

This matter, at best, is that beauty is becoming more and more popular, and everyone has the right to be beautiful. But at worst, although there are more and more beauty tools, the public's definition of beauty is becoming more and more simple, more and more sensory-oriented, and closer to instinct.

For this trend of aesthetic singleness, we can not expect beauty tools to do anything, nor can we expect online celebrities who rely on their appearance to reverse aesthetics.

After all, they are commercial creatures, and since they want to make money, they cannot go against the aesthetic needs of the public or against human nature.

The so-called East Asian witchcraft only sees through human nature.

Reference:

1. "Chinese people who are good at Meitu are at the forefront of the selfie era," Beijing News

2. "filter Evolutionism: from tool to Aesthetic Definer", three tones

3. Wu Xinhong: the Picture Myth of Meitu, Zeng Xianghu

4. "the 10th Anniversary of Meitu: starting with tools, tends to socialize", Entertainment Capital

5. A brief History of Social Network filters, Tencent Research Institute

6. "filters may not be able to wait for spring." the Internet points to the north.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: IC Lab (ID:InsightPlusClub)

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