
Show HN: NightCafe Creator – neural style transfer app with style masks - GusRuss89
https://creator.nightcafe.studio
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primedteam
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.

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GusRuss89
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.

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GusRuss89
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.

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airdeck
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.

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GusRuss89
@airdeck thanks for being the #1 Creator and early adopter!

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aviditas
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)

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GusRuss89
iPhones do this sometimes. Thanks for letting me know - I will add this to my
to-do list.

Thanks for trying it out!

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nojvek
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.

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GusRuss89
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.

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bluepnume
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.

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GusRuss89
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.

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100-xyz
Good job. Fun to experiment with!

~~~
GusRuss89
Thanks for giving it a go!

