
Let's Enhance – free online image upscale and enhancement with neural networks - RedCrowbar
https://letsenhance.io/
======
shock
> Your photos uploaded > We've started processing. It takes some time,
> meanwhile you _need to create account to access your results_.

What a dick move! Why not say I need to give you my email from the start?

~~~
adamc
Yeah, totally agree with this.

------
advisedwang
Signup required to view results, abandoned my session.

~~~
darbagegump
Same. It wouldn't even accept mailinator.

------
throwaway2016a
I would pay for this in a heartbeat if this was a desktop app I could use
offline. On the cloud I'm not so sure. With all the stories going around HN I
barely trust Facebook and Google with my photos.

~~~
PeterisP
Such services won't realistically be a desktop app, since that pretty much
requires them to give away their service and "secret sauce" in a way that's
infinitely reusable / copyable for anyone who cares enough to extract it.

The usual situation for services like this is that it either runs on their
servers, or you're willing a to pay sufficiently large amount to make it worth
the full standard enterprise B2B sales process, a negotiated contract incl
NDAs and liability and for them to do an on-site installation. So if you're a
big organization that wants to care about trade secrets or classified
information, then it can be arranged, but it's not manageable for individual
consumers or small businesses.

~~~
slashcom
Alas, the "secret sauce" is already freely available:
[http://waifu2x.udp.jp/](http://waifu2x.udp.jp/). The only real difference is
the (very, very appreciable) effort to make it commercialized software.
Anybody who cares enough to disassemble it for reuse could build the core tech
themselves.

~~~
throwaway2016a
Looking at that project on github[1] I can't help but to think the algorithm
need to upsample anime images (like in this project) might be different than
the one needed to upsample photos. Anime has the benefit of having a lot of
sections of solid colors.

Edit: Actually looking at the source further it appears they also have models
for photos as part of that project in addition to the model for anime.

[1] [https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x](https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x)

~~~
titanovo
(again that's the guy who did letsenhance) - waifu2x is great for anime, and
in some rare cases it even outperforms us. In all the rest of cases - we are 1
head up from waifu, bigjpg, srgan, etc. Feel free to compare.

------
Lerc
Title should be updated to reflect sign-up required.

Anything else I could say about their tactics would be less than charitable.

------
dustinmoorenet
This might me awesome, but I don't want to create yet another account to see
it work.

~~~
XOPJ
I get "Invalid email address" for my email so they are applying some sort of
aggressive filtering on their email acceptance anyways which IMO is a really
bad sign they are building an email list they want to profit from.

~~~
obiefernandez
If you look at their pricing model, which is 4 free... sign up for paid plan
to get more then the aggressive email validation makes a bit more sense. I'm
not connected to them in any way, just trying to give the benefit of the
doubt.

------
titanovo
Hey guys, that's Alex - creator of Let's Enhance. Tool is great and blah-blah,
but I see you are reeeealy frustrated with our email/registration policy. Ok,
hands clear here - no email list selling, we just want to earn some buck from
professional users and give regular guys a way to use it for free. That's why
we require a real email or FB acc. TBH, IF some of you can come up with a
better strategy that will be more polite to users, keep our cloud cheap (when
we were 100% free I burned lots of cash just it keep it running in GPU cloud),
etc, etc. Really, no BS here – marketing advice is really welcomed here.

~~~
gmiller123456
>but I see you are reeeealy frustrated with our email/registration policy

No, they're frustrated that you aren't up front about it. Trying to BS around
the actual problem just makes it worse. I really couldn't imagine giving money
to a company engaging in such tactics, I feel like I'd have to have a lawyer
go over every last detail to ensure I'm getting what I expect.

------
obiefernandez
FWIW I tried it out on a small screenshot of an old grayscale portrait and was
very happy with the results. Feels like the future.

~~~
jack6e
I tried on a larger color picture that was taken with a low quality phone
camera and received entirely unimpressive results. It was hard to tell if
anything had even been done.

------
tzahola
Before/after comparison with nearest neighbour “interpolation”. Lol!

------
jaredcwhite
uploaded an image—says ETA 22 minutes! I guess I have to wait until the
machine finishes dreaming all the missing details...

~~~
vlprans12
LetsEnhance CTO here. I shamelessly grabbed part of our GPU cluster yesterday
for experiments with new nets and infrastructure. Didn't expect this HN thread
coming out :)

