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Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app with style masks

by GusRuss89 on 3/14/20, 9:29 PM with 14 comments

• by primedteam on 3/14/20, 10:28 PM

  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.

• by GusRuss89 on 3/14/20, 9:31 PM

  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.

• by airdeck on 3/14/20, 11:14 PM

  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.

• by aviditas on 3/15/20, 2:30 AM

  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)

• by nojvek on 3/14/20, 10:52 PM

  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.

• by bluepnume on 3/14/20, 10:46 PM

  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.

• by 100-xyz on 3/15/20, 3:12 AM

  Good job. Fun to experiment with!