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.
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.
Thanks for trying it out!
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.
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.
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.
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.
