for all who don't know about the submission months ago.

http://www.deepart.io/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511572

And now at http://deepart.io/ we have hi-resolution and the authors of the algorithm on-board. Thanks for mentioning us :)

Just some UI/UX observations:

The "Use style" wording didn't immediately register for me that the images were clickable. I wondered why the gallery images all had the same description when they were clearly different styles!

Perhaps "Use this style" would be more expressive?

When you do click through, it shows the same image (with face) to be used as the style image, leaving me wondering if a user provided style image should just be a texture (newsprint, vegetables etc.), or an already styled image.

The "Buy a painting" button is deceptive, since it's a canvas print, not a painting. I was going to suggest teaming up with instapainting, but I see they beat you to it [1]. I guess you could always go to the source [2].

The resulting modal dialog on clicking "Buy a painting" barely fits in the browser on a 15" retina MBP, even then, the cookie info bar clips the button, so I suspect you may be loosing sales from people who can't figure out how to get to the button, especially on smaller screens (you'd be surprised!).

Clicking through that dialog brings me to an ebay page, but not for the image I selected to buy. There are a range of other images shown, but it doesn't seem to be possible to choose one, never mind the one I wanted. I have no idea what I'm buying, or how to buy what I want.

Finally I can't "Buy", I can only bid, as it's an auction, not a "Buy it now".

Oh, and please tell Michael to change his name to Andy. :) [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10162121 [2] http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/oil-painting-on-demand.html [3] http://deepart.io/page/about/

Thank you very much! As these are recent changes which we haven't tested live, your comments are very useful and we are actually implementing them now.

You're welcome - I'm available for consultation! :D

You should add an explanation for the waiting time, queue thing. This was unexpected and also not really clear. First thought I could only get it by paying...

Good point, thanks! We actually had one, but we removed it in the current version (it seemed natural for us but it obviously is not) - we will bring it back.

We simply have limited resources for servers, but still want to provide the highest quality possible in the free version. That's why there is a queue, but we are working hard to make the implementation faster and more efficient :)

Great.

The success message (when there will be one - there should be one instead of only the submissions queue) should definitely include an explanation, what happens next and how I can influence it. Will I get an email when my pictures are ready? Can I schedule more pictures?

I think you will have more success showing the # of people in the queue and a "jump the queue" feature.

Is there a way to build a "I want it NOW, even if it isn't that great... (and get the great version later via email)".

The public/private thing could also use some explanation "Show this on the website" vs. "Only give the result to me".

"Delete" would probably better be named "remove" as you remove the submission from the queue, and don't really delete anything that was already created.

Also, "Submit a new image" could let me choose some style images... but I bet that's already on your backlog anyway.

Nice idea, nice tool!

Definitely it all requires more explanation as we take it for granted but for users it is not clear what is happening

Unfortunately "I want it now" is not possible for the moment as the computations are really heavy and there is a lot of people who want to use it. But we also have some ideas for that.

Now our focus is the quality, regardless the cost. We increased the resolution and we try to make things faster. Later we will figure out how to make it more sustainable.

I really appreciate your suggestions.

On the waiting time point. I was putting together a similar service to yours (though you got there first). We managed to get our processing time down to under 50s for a 300x300 image. How do you cope with such long times? Or, how long is the waiting time?

Would you mind going into detail on how higher res is achieved? Splitting the original image into smaller regions, and rendering each separately?

Given that we are discussing it in the comments of the app who just misappropriated the algorithm, I unfortunately have to refuse your request for the moment, sorry. We love open research and open source but there is always some risk involved.

There is 30 characters limit for the mail field :(.

Indeed, there is a bug in submission form. You can register with longer emails through the registration form. Thanks for reporting the error.

I was just thinking that. Seems it might be based on the description. Kinda interested how they'd do it in a speedy way on mobile devices. Hope they didn't just knock-off the open-source code though.

From the website: "This is incredibly computationally intensive, and even on a cloud of the fastest computers, it takes a few minutes to process each image."

I'm pretty sure they're using the open-source code that was published.

"Stiefvater [...] described it to me as 'black magic,' and doesn’t even fully understand how it works. He downloaded it from Github, where a computer programmer he’s never met posted it."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/1...

Yes. That was back in September. Before Pikazo or Deepart even existed.

Let's refrain from making nasty implications about each other, shall we? Thank you.

No nasty implications sounds fair to me. Good luck!

Ok good.

Would you also mind retracting your claim below that we have "misappropriated" your technology? Perhaps we're having a language problem - "misappropriate" is a crime in English. If you honestly believe a crime has been committed, I would strongly urge you to discuss it with us (somewhere other than this public forum). We've tried a few times now to reach out to your team, and have not heard back.

Thank you.

K.

I am sorry, I didn't mean any legal accusation - it just feels a little odd that the description of the app sounds as if you invented the technology without ever referring to the original work.

Yeah - I think you're right - that's a fair complaint. In the original description I had a link to the paper - but somehow that got lost in the versioning. I'm traveling right now, give me a couple days to fix that.

the description sounds like they're running a server farm, not doing the processing on the phone.

Why do I have to download an app to use it then?

It lets them monazite it in a way which a web-app might not.

Because that's what users expect and it's much easier to create a usable user experience around photos, uploading, notification when it is ready etc.