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Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by primedteam on Saturday March 14, 2020 @06:28PM (#22579214)
Nice art works and slick experience. Some suggestions

1. While waiting for the art to be generated, get the user to do a hot-or-not between some existing art to get a better sense of what they like and then generate them something

2. Have a little more feedback on how much longer they'll need to wait while generating

3. Once generated, show the artwork framed and hanging somewhere not just the rendering

4. When a user kicks off a job, kick off a bunch in parallel using some other styles in case the style they pick really doesn't work well.

Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @06:33PM (#22579253)
These are great suggestions, thanks!

I especially like the last one, particularly for a user's first creation - because if their first creation doesn't work out so well, it's often their last. Auto-creating a few jobs based on their content image - with styles that are known to work pretty well - would really improve their experience and first impressions.

Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Sunday March 15, 2020 @07:32AM (#22582848)
#4 is now implemented. Thanks again for the suggestion.
Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @05:31PM (#22578876)
NightCafe Creator has been my side project for about 6 months. It's a PWA built with TypeScript, React, Next.js and Firebase; and the style transfer jobs run on Algorithmia.

There are plenty of neural style transfer apps online. Some of the features that set mine apart are:

- Multiple style images with relative weights

- Style masks - clip a style to a certain region of the content image

- Free image search built in (via Pexels)

- No signup required to create (uses Firebase's anonymous users)

There are still a lot of improvements to make - I want to improve and speed up the back end algorithm, add public user accounts and the ability to 'like' creations, along with a never-ending list of smaller things like pagination - which I've avoided adding thus far.

This is probably the most effort I've ever put into a side project. Would love to hear your thoughts and am happy to answer any questions.

Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by airdeck on Saturday March 14, 2020 @07:14PM (#22579507)
I’ve been playing with this for several weeks now and it’s a lot of fun. I was always really intrigued by style transfer algorithms and thus was a great low-barrier way to play around with them.
Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @07:18PM (#22579527)
@airdeck thanks for being the #1 Creator and early adopter!
Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by aviditas on Saturday March 14, 2020 @10:30PM (#22580701)
Is there a way to rotate the original image after uploading? The image I tried originally uploaded sideways so it made doing the mask more difficult. I edited the photo on my phone to rotate it and resubmit it. (my phone didn't show me the photo needed to be adjusted until after I uploaded it)
Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @11:14PM (#22580913)
iPhones do this sometimes. Thanks for letting me know - I will add this to my to-do list.

Thanks for trying it out!

Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by nojvek on Saturday March 14, 2020 @06:52PM (#22579371)
Love the giraffe image. Although I wonder if your algorithm handles faces well.

There is a huge demand in Instagram for auto touchups. Like improved lighting, smoother skin, vibrant colors, convert to anime etc. Make amateur photos look like they’re taken by pros.

Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @07:03PM (#22579432)
Faces often don't work well unless they're really tightly framed / close up. I think it's because if the eyes turn out a bit weird, it's very off-putting.

I've thought a bit about marketing to Instagrammers, I think neural style for short videos would be a good service to offer. Not sure where it fits on my roadmap yet though.

Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by bluepnume on Saturday March 14, 2020 @06:46PM (#22579331)
Very cool! I remember working on an evolutionary algorithm at one point to generate CSS versions of images using random fonts, positions and transforms. The results you've got here are very impressive.
Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @06:51PM (#22579366)
Thanks, that project sounds interesting, I'd love to see some examples.

I should also clarify - I'm more of a front-end developer and I'm just using an open source style transfer algorithm from github (with some minor tweaks) on the back end. I can't take much credit for how well the artworks turn out, apart from the factors of UX guiding people to choose good images, and a good set of preset styles.

Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by 100-xyz on Saturday March 14, 2020 @11:12PM (#22580905)
Good job. Fun to experiment with!
Re:Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app wi... by GusRuss89 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @11:15PM (#22580914)
Thanks for giving it a go!