#stylenet

[knaz]

Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

[cutulisci]

Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

[prostheticknowledge]

Удали мои фото

Trailer for Russian film ‘Delete My Photos’ uses the style transfer tech used in the Prisma app:

Trailer for «Delete My Photos» film by Dmitry Nikiforov and Aleksei Korneev made with neural networks of Prisma app. Presented variations of processing image. Maybe world first trailer done by neural networks in cinema. 

Link

[revdancatt]

Overwatch - Hanamura

A screen grab of Hanamura, dragged through Prisma applying the Tokyo effect, then into Photoshop, scaled up, and Alien Skin's "Snap Art" filter to apply brush strokes.

Prisma is good at art style, but not so much at the painted effect. Snap Art is good at making brush strokes, but less style.

This image is 25% scale of the original 4320x4320 px image.

[procedural-generation]

Prisma

Style transfer has gone mainstream: Prisma is a mobile app that can transfer styles onto your photos. 

So, now that literal style transfer Instagram filters are here, how do you feel about them? I’ve notice a couple of amateur artists who were taking aback at the computer getting a better result than they thought they could draw, while others have started experimenting rapidly.

Prisma did a very good job training their networks and picking good styles. Some combinations don’t quite work, but the fast turnaround time makes it one of the easier ways to experiment with style transfer.

Style transfer inherently has more variety than older filters since it reinterprets the image. A typical Instagram filter takes away information, hopefully focusing the composition. A style transfer can add information (from the source style) while also hopefully enhancing the interesting parts.

It’s not quite as flexible as I’d like for a professional tool, since the only choices are the style and the amount of blending. Don’t get me wrong: those are both really powerful levers. But I can immediately see possibilities in layering and combining multiple styles. 

I guess I’ll have to keep collecting my own toolset for now. Though I expect that someone will make a dedicated artist’s tool fairly soon. Or a Photoshop plugin.

[prostheticknowledge]

StyLit

Assistive Creativity research from DCGI and Adobe Research employs Artistic Style Transfer method to 3D graphics rendering with convincing practical and stylistic results in various mediums.

The first video is a realtime demonstration of the project in action, the second a technical description:

We present an approach to example-based stylization of 3D renderings that better preserves the rich expressiveness of hand-created artwork. Unlike previous techniques, which are mainly guided by colors and normals, our approach is based on light propagation in the scene. This novel type of guidance can distinguish among context-dependent illumination effects, for which artists typically use different stylization techniques, and delivers a look closer to realistic artwork. In addition, we demonstrate that the current state of the art in guided texture synthesis produces artifacts that can significantly decrease the fidelity of the synthesized imagery, and propose an improved algorithm that alleviates them. Finally, we demonstrate our method's effectiveness on a variety of scenes and styles, in applications like interactive shading study or autocompletion. 

More Here

[procedural-generation]

neural-doodle: Semantic Style Transfer

I’ve talked about StyleNet and related neural network image generation before, but the level that Alex Champandard has pushed it to is mindblowing. Doodle a simple composition and the algorithm can turn it into a completely different style.

Right now, it’s only been tested on landscapes and portraits, but the potential just in that area is pretty immense. With a public release in the same week week that AlphaGo won the first game in its match against Lee Sedol, computers seem to be finding new ways to replace humans.

So what does this mean for artists? Now that a Photoshop filter to create a Renoir landscape isn’t too far fetched, is there still a place for human artists?

My answer, as always, is that of course there is. Photography didn’t remove human artists. New technology has always been incorporated into painting, from better chemicals, to reference tools, to new ways to think about the world, to reactions that look for the things that the technology can’t do.

But it will change art, especially the commercial production of art and the signaling bound up in fine art painting. Will we view Van Gogh the same way when the Van Gogh filter is all over Instagram? How will this affect the kinds of painting that people are talking about? And, most interesting to me, what new opportunities will this create for artists?

As with every new tool, only some artists will embrace this particular software.

With tools like this, the artist becomes Kasparov’s centaur, a melding of human and machine. Garry Kasparov has also referred to using a computer this way for chess as “Advanced Chess,” and others have called it “Formula 1 for Chess.” You’re still playing the game, but the rote work has been automated, freeing you to find your personal expression.

Using computational tools to make art often feels like the paint guns in Strangethink’s Joy Exhibition. It takes a combination of skill, perseverance, and luck to find the result you envisioned in your head. 

What this definitely won’t do, though, is eliminate the fundamentals. A discipline I learned a long time ago is that sketching out your ideas before you start playing with the machine can help you identify the weaknesses of the software and not be limited by them. It’s sometimes too easy to get stuck on a local peak, because the path lead you there, not realizing that just beyond the fog is a mountain more beautiful and terrifying than you imagined you could imagine. A solid grounding in the basics can help you avoid getting stuck there.

On the flip side, if you’re working with software it’s often useful to learn to speak its language and learn what things it makes easy, and what it could do easily if you just have the right perspective.

I’m looking forward to what happens with neural-doodle in the future. It’s the exact kind of new tool that will inspire that one artist who is dazzled by its possibilities and uses it to make something new that the rest of us have yet to glimpse.

The source code for neural-doodle is on github. You can also read the research paper, with lots more pictures.

[prostheticknowledge]

curcuit_city

Stylenet neural network style transfer rendering of a cityscape with computer circuit architecture image, created with @deepforger twitter bot.

Link