Keegan – Personal photo coach | Hacker News Reader

Keegan – Personal photo coach

keegan.regaind.io

179 pointsp4bl0137 comments

Open articleView on HN

So... I am a pro-photographer ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) https://i.imgur.com/yBCXOpe.png

Well done :p gaming AI systems is always great fun ^^

Red circle on black, 7.7:

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/8OerASkBTWupl7srWfFYrg

Full red gets only 1.9 but... 82% in composition!

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/c5Vyyn4ZRsKJ4cvS_KYHXg

"AI is just around the corner, everyone, it'll be replacing humans within a few years."

To be honest that would be quite cool if you used colored glass or something to make it as an actual photo

9.0/10 http://imgur.com/gallery/6Lhwr

"You need to invest in some studio lighting… The pic is not very interesting… It's flawed, but you'll get there: keep working on your lighting, framing, and composition. It's only a 3.2/10."

Uploaded the second picture of this fantastic set by a 1950's photographer from Hong Kong: http://designyoutrust.com/2016/02/hong-kong-in-the-1950s-cap...

Many of them get labeled as #badcolors or #boring, I guess it might be related to the lack of color features...

I think the fact that the AI is developed by Regaind (https://regaind.io/) must be taken into account. Their service is not intended for artsy pictures. It is rather targeted at people who have 1000 photos on their reflex from their last vacations and want to make a relevant and beautiful album of 50 photos to remember their trip, but don't want to spend two weeks comparing and selecting the right ones.

See for instance their demo here : https://regaind.io/demo/.

Exactly =) The target is not professional photographers but pretty much everyone else taking pictures everyday with their smartphones. Artsy photos are more often than not wonderful for reasons which are not way too semantic for us for now - situations, etc, and which are way beyond what standard photographers do!

That's actually a really great idea! Gonna have to check this out more.

In my experience, even amongst vacation snapshots, the best tend to be of the accidentally artsy variety. I suppose this algorithm would completely fail to recognize the hilarity of the mirroring sphere of a tourist's perfectly bowling-ball-bald head in front of an apse, hovering under the blob of light that is the eye of the pantheon dome on a phone snap. I know I did, (miss it) on the first few times I scrolled through the series.

Generally I feel tempted to file this site under fun with phrase generators, with some ML thrown in to make it slightly more interesting than purely random phrase generator toys. But are there really no use cases for automated checks of aesthetic conventions? Sifting through the data dump of a full day of wedding shots maybe? I know I would be tempted to start with a computer generated shortlist. Mate it with face detection so that you can cluster by subset of attendees (each combination of faces captured must be present at least once in the final set) and... well I guess they already use systems like that, it's 2016.

An entirely unrelated idea in the general area of photography, algorithms and human learning that I still miss is this: an option in manual mode that takes a full auto shot right after the manual one, exposing how good or bad the algorithms are vs the operator. Or do some cameras have something like that? Do manufacturers omit it to not expose deficiencies in their algorithms? Do they omit it to not hurt the feelings of customers when they are worse than auto mode?

This is indeed a "fun" project which showcases the technology and provides (I think) fairly relevant comments (trust me - a random generator is much worse, we had terrible comments at the beginning of the project). The other technology modules you describe (face recognition etc) are indeed requirements for a semi or fully automated curation system.

That demo is pretty impressive. Removes duplicates, and you get a pretty good result going down to the top 25. Nice stuff.

Thanks!

Thanks for the link. I love these.

Indeed, it does not like my 4x5s, but it does like some anime figure pictures I took with my cell phone.

I think it basically looks to see if something is in focus, and you know the "rule of thirds", which it must have learned from custom-cropped photos uploaded to 500px.

On top of that, it hates post-sunset landscape.

Here I played with colors and color temp on a post-sunset landscape, and the resulting image, while really not great --in fact, plain weird-- is rated 9.3

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/04t9ZlbZRDqbc2mPx-4CvA

Does the system have a notion of how sure it is of the rating it gives? [Edit: should it say "without a doubt"? There should be some doubt.]

(Also, is it deterministic (same image always get the same rating); it sure appears to be and it's certainly what people expect of a bot, but that's not how humans rate things...)

To be honest, I kinda like the image. It might not be great to you but it has a nice spooky fantasy air to it to me. As to wether it should be considered a good picture, I have no idea.

It loves this image (9.4):

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/BRINmnczQ-yY7wLn0xbaYA

but says that The background really adds something special. The background is... full black?

And it hates this image (4.7):

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/nWu-YSRgSrWWfwxUgUorcQ

and gives it a "good timing" of 35%. The timing is what makes this photograph ;-)

Also, while direct links work, the back button doesn't seem to update the content of the page?

Fun how it saw the good timing but put such a low score. Keegan is tough with low-light photos overall. Gotta improve that!

What's your browser? (re: back button problem)

Chrome 53.0.2785.143 m on Win7 64bits (with Ublock Origin).

Thanks, gotta investigate :)

I've emailed them to mention that low lit photos seem to score much lower than they should, and they plan to look into improving that.

wow, thanks for the link! those are really nice photographs, beautifully framed and very artistic (for pure art - that woman leaning on a wall, with the triangular shadow across the building, come on - wow!) and obviously even more informative to us 66 years later than when they were made - that is true art, wow.

one quick question - the page you linked starts with a top picture and then a set, by "the second picture of this fantastic set" did you mean the second picture on the page (gondolier in dark canal with tight ray of light from above) or second in the "set" (guy crossing tracks running with empty rickshaw)

Hey there! I'm Regaind's CTO and will be happy to answer your questions :) We built this as a coaching tool aimed at helping amateurs take better photos, in the context of building a smart and flexible automatic roll curation system that goes beyond the "bad exposition/motion blur detection" that's often used. The end goal is to fluidify the use of photos by killing the last bottleneck: sorting.

I haven't seen any comments that I would classify as coaching. Instead they seem to be simple critiques.

"Overall, this image is good, but it could be great." https://keegan.regaind.io/p/whFZsOsRRfG4sRBGCDiA7g

"The blur and the subject together, so good. " https://keegan.regaind.io/p/HopS2XrnSmGhXiMg6AFoLA

"This is a solid image." https://keegan.regaind.io/p/USKPgJgfRE-h_n7rh2QnHg

"So simple, but so good" https://keegan.regaind.io/p/xbQHksWyRsOPWhW3hhs6RA

Don't get me wrong, I think this is pretty cool, but there is no real actionable feedback, so there unless you can guess as to what triggers the higher scores, there isn't much coaching, so much as "gaming" the AI.

Hey there, Coaching/advice is provided when you score much lower than that! We kinda don't take the risk of telling you "improve your composition" when the overall picture looks good and the non-standard composition may actually be what makes it work so well. Just a few examples with coaching: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/ne5Xql3LQ4Wcp3lNTwpA3A https://keegan.regaind.io/p/JAi7xXNsSw6CLzALqmdNpQ https://keegan.regaind.io/p/RA1BIfwLTwmdo44ACxsctg

Makes sense.

My bias as an Asian American: I translate a 7.4 to a 74/100 to a C, which is not a good grade, hence a desire to see coaching to achieve a score of 9.8 and above.

Definitely fun to play with. Seems to really like bokeh...

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/sqs8Z8RgSsuaSG3gLxo0bQ

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/dNMYqs3aSpa_x0fYMU_AhA

I'm not really seeing it couching me though:

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/6QD0ycG3QTK1uM2IbIslSw

"This landscape is good, but could be great". Not really sure what to do with that.

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/lhCz67aBTnmI5GB9sWO4cQ

Seems like a low score. Again though, it's not really clear why. "Bad lighting" seems odd, because maybe I have no taste but the lighting is the reason for the shot in the first place. For reference, here's the original: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefandufresne/16091643487/in/...

So far, AFAICT, it is a big fan of single focus thing in foreground with lots of blur in the background.

Edit: I'm having trouble getting it to ever like black and white shots: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/-NZR7e1FTJGtpMN3BPYlAg

Edit 2: Okay whaaaaaaatttt I'm really disagreeing with a lot here. Maybe I just think some of my shots are better than they really are, but 4.1 for this is crazy https://keegan.regaind.io/p/y3LaI_J0R6a33eJ_fOQfew

Yes, single focus, bokeh, and the point about colors is a good one, too. It likes lots of colors. That monochrome landscape is beautiful, by the way.

Indeed, my seashell-in-the-sand picture with lots of blur got a 9.2. Also most of the hall of fame is subject+blur.

Didn't try B&W yet, don't have many pictures like that.

Algorithm seems to really like portraits. Every one I uploaded, it scored very highly. Threw in Afghan Girl by Steve McCurry https://keegan.regaind.io/p/yBJXfxHeTEWtvtGDxgupaA to see what would happen.

That's been my experience as well. It must use face detection rather heavily. It also doesn't like photos with no central subject.

Actually there's absolutely no face detection in there !

But it loves contrast, no? Global contrast as well as local contrast.

Normal BW portrait, 8.5:

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/YLzqGGvuSFOv7PwLl8qC8A

Same image with clarity upped to 100% (horrible, IMHO), 8.6:

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/JbMQUyfBTNuoAWveabPCwg

It does like contrast! Hm, the score change is sufficiently low to be within the error bars I'd say. I agree that the upped clarity is less beautiful, but it adds a nice touch of sharpness which Keegan likes a lot as well!

The first one looks too blurry to me and the second too sharp; did you try an intermediate one?

You can do a lot worse with contrast/clarity than that.

No face detection? It noticed there was a baby in my picture and commented on the expression: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/XCBCz-9_TrC31c4Opa1mdQ I'm sure there are many different definitions of face detection. Care to elaborate on what kind of face detection it doesn't have?

When I have time later, I might feed it some images from the Magnum (the agency) corpus and see what feedback I get.

Once upon a time, in certain newbie photo critique forums, pranksters would upload a renowned photographers image for critique... Hilarious feedback from new photographers showing off their critiquing prowess.

I tried it with a couple of photos that got me awards in prestigious international competitions. They were assessed as being OK (~5/10)

I tried an Ansel Adams photo - "This landscape is good, but it could be great. Let's give it a 7.5/10"

Adams was a pretty straight forward photographer, so I suspect his example might fare better than say a Winogrand or D'Agata, for example.

I got it to give me a 9.7/10 but I seriously doubt I'm a better photographer than Ansel Adams I'm betting it has an unintentional bias against black and white photography.

I am chuckling at the idea of an art critic version of this and feeding it famous works.

What do you think this is?

Weird to imply such a strict delineation between photography and art.

Keegan seems to be judging the mechanics of photographic skill and not the artistry derived from it.

The humor is from imagining a robot pan great works because of implementation flaws. "Mona Lisa. Muddy and drab. 2/10"

Nothing really to do with me trying to classify what is/isn't art.

Actually it likes some pictures of the famous paintings :) "Simple but it's good" https://keegan.regaind.io/p/z7gQYuFxTTWTK00kHMuaPg

Truly impressive. I've been putting in pictures of my daughter from my phone and I think Keegan really shines at evaluating the pictures I take of my life. Sorta like a writing coach for a diary.

Thanks! This is exactly the use case :)

The difficulty will be understanding context. Was blurr intended for effect? Same with a fuzzy picture, or a dark one, or one with no apparent subject, or was it informational only, etc.

Some photography is presented as contemporary art, some isn't. "Fine art photography" is usually not credible contemporary art. It's often black and white, formalistic, maybe a female nude... I can imagine an AI that only understands formal qualities becoming pretty good at rating it.

What you might call conceptual photography, on the other hand, is "AI-complete". It's as hard as literature to appreciate, you definitely need a full human-equivalent AI. Roland Barthes' ideas of the studium and the punctum start to open up the intellectual depth of that kind of photo.

This kind of project is possibly credible as a rater of formal quality against some ideal norm, maybe stretching to understanding composition in a crude sense. But everyone knows that it's the unexpected but visually compelling feature that makes an image good. (Or alternatively the significance of its content.) Standard strategies like the "rule of thirds" can only produce formulaic images.

I just tried a famous Cartier-Bresson image...

"It's not super amazing. It's…something I guess; you could do better. Try improving your colors. This is at most 3.9/10. #boring"

Yeah, Henri, improve your colors you lazy hack! ;)

Poor D'agata: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/4ez2sHM5QDOT4nR6rzqU2g

and Autio: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/qzqjM1CPRxGtkL1GQ4KL0g

But I get it. It's a great tool for beginners to see their rookie faults and address the basics [1]before they can foray into more intermediate photography. And then break the basics [2] in order to know why breaking the rules work and sometimes don't.

Semi-related (to the optics/mechanics) is this tool[3]

[1]https://www.flickr.com/photos/msc72/3184463442

[2]https://www.flickr.com/groups/1271834@N25/

[3]http://camerasim.com/apps/original-camerasim/web/

I'm impressed with the ability to recognize different scenes and subject matters. There are achievements that include photographing waterfalls and beaches! How cool is this?

Side note: Is this bot on Facebook Messenger as well? Or did I misunderstand?

Yes it is, you can talk to Keegan here: https://www.facebook.com/keeganregaind :).

Yes, I was surprised by this too; I uploaded a photo of mostly just sand (no sea visible) and it recognized it as a beach. Amazing.

Yeah... No. Not yet.

1) It utterly fails as a coaching tool. "Your framing is 71% correct". Great. Awesome. That's maybe technically correct (the best kind!), but it's utterly unhelpful.

2) It fails at images taken to capture a mood instead of a motif. (Exactly what I'd expect from ML :)

3) It has problems with things that we usually consider iconic photos. Annie Leibovitz's picture of Mick Jagger in an elevator? Meh, 5.2. Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" gets at least a 7.6, so on par with my vacation selfies.

It's a great idea. It needs a lot of love.

A few answers :)

1) as I mentioned elsewhere, the explicit coaching happens when you submit a photo that Keegan think is bad (say score < 5).

2) Mostly true, except that it's surprisingly good at capturing the notion of good timing, which I did not expect from ML ^^

3) well, as for the Mick Jagger picture, I can see why Keegan dislikes it: it's simply not that good technically. What makes it great is that it's Mick Jagger and that he has a very deep sight (imho), which the model indeed does not capture. For the other picture, yeah, the score is not that good, but the comment is spot on (in my humble and very biased opinion) :p

Thanks for the feedback, and yeah, definitely needs more love before it's a perfect predictor! Nicely enough, classification tasks with tons of supervision still make a lot of errors too ^^ (http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdOxQRbWAAEUZM6.jpg)

10/10 https://keegan.regaind.io/p/yCcgM4AJRZ-mnsVmpPhSbA

Isn't Harambe hate speech now? Or was that Pepe?

That is pretty amazing. I'm not sure why your post got flagged. Are people that afraid of the word "dicks"? Have they not heard the meme?

9.9/10 (https://keegan.regaind.io/p/9KfI67VdTGin64pOzN696g) - funny how a quick glance at the Hall of Fame and my brain can work out which of my pictures will match the preferred style in order to get a high score pretty readily.

I do wonder if it's a bit sycophantic, after all who wants to be told they're terrible all the time.

To me, Keegan misses out on the art of photography and is focusing more on the "rules" of photography.

That being said, it's fun to see where photos fall in its grading system, even if I personally disagree with it.

For example, this portrait by Vivian Maier gets a 4.2 https://keegan.regaind.io/p/9VJdlageRTusSf7Z2qDQPA

If you click the slightly hidden "get more feedback" button it shows:

Subject well framed: 100% Super sharp subject: 71% Great composition: 68% Pleasant blur: 57% Great lightning: 35% Well chosen background: 33% Interesting/original subject: 32% Good timing: 26%

So it's not very happy with half the categories but scores 9.4/10, so the score is definitely not an unweighted mean! (geometric or arithmetic).

Thanks for the feedback! Any tip on how to make that button more salient?

It looks like a dropdown / <select> box.

I think it heavily dislikes the obstruding object at the bottom. Not his tastes :(

Trying to figure out how to make a comparison of this to Professor Oak's photo critique in Pokemon Snap without beckoning all the HN downvotes...

"Well done!"

"Great color and amazing angle. It's okay, but I want to see more; keep working on your composition! A solid 5.7/10. Not bad, but I'm sure you can do better!"

How the heck is this feedback supposed to be useful / helpful / actionable?

Uploaded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize photograph of migrants from Turkey landing on Lesbos in October after battling rough seas:

...This photo is alright! I give you a 7.1/10. That's a very decent photo for a start! Can you show me something even better?

That's a great example of the 'third element': composition, exposure and opportunity.

Sometimes you can make opportunity "happen" through equipment with more reach or foreknolwedge. But sometimes things just happen and a mediocre shot is more powerful than none at all.

Sadly we cut Keegan off internet a while ago to train, and he is not quite aware of the global context which makes this photo extremely taking :(

Kind of cool.

9.8, from France. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/xbQHksWyRsOPWhW3hhs6RA

Not really a coach though. More of a critic.

Based on other people's attempts to please it, I thought it would like this close-up of a snail I took. 9.4/10 and a ribbon so I guess we know what it likes! https://keegan.regaind.io/p/rUMLzUc5SO-aZUoZzz31Tg

On the other hand, it doesn't like the lighting or colors on this, and wants more bokeh. I'm willing to grant that the composition is dull, but the colors? https://keegan.regaind.io/p/pQ9U6CiMRKWNkYVgqLZTCQ

And again it complains about lighting, which is probably the last thing I would worry about on this one: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/-CC6phAPScux1CSYPqY24Q

And this one has the same light, and cleaner composition, but it still complains- I'm not sure what it thinks would improve it. "Bad composition" is not helpful advice here. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/6T6V3k8fRLSWMn2JT6-N4g

Meanwhile, it's weirdly positive about this digital monstrosity: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/Csyd3O6pRg6vra2hqumKOQ

It's really in to bad stock photos:

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/BpYbZznQQQObZa9BDHH7AQ

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/rIr8UAIxTuSxGeZg5FumbA

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/8duBvzXmRfGAg7DpdJQSiA

Everyone has some bad tastes at times, no ? :) But yeah, it's not perfect yet!

One of the issues is sometimes, it's okay to do things in a non-standard way for effect. The other issue is it seems to think the only thing that matters in photography is depth of field.

For example, this kind of generic picture of my son during the fall got an 8.2: http://imgur.com/a/SOFE0

Where as this other picture I took, one I think is technically superior recently got a 7.1: http://imgur.com/a/VeEL9

And then there was this one I took in Rome, which got a comment of "not enough blur" which is the exact opposite of what I wanted. This is a fiat in rome, the background is the entire point. rated at 6.2 http://imgur.com/a/zLStt

Compared to this pretty generic musuem pic... that's not really interesting in any way, but managed to get an 8.2 (probably because of the blur) http://imgur.com/a/Szc9I

I don't understand their algorithm. Take three of my photos off my Flickr page:

1) I consider this photo mediocre. Gets a 10/10, Platinum Ribbon. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/lJ7FEb1kQt-mM1kIe-kVuw

2) I consider this photo to be fantastic. Perfect reflection. Gets a 7.7/10, no ribbons. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/KUzvRfFeRsK1Lj1selLWQw

3) I consider this photo good but not great. Okay but not perfect reflection. Gets an 8.7/10, Reflection Ribbon. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/zaRlMOEySFWKTZlSvWO3Rw

This is confusing as hell to me. I'm averaging 7.98/10 over 30 photos, which personally I think is too high. I'm not that good. But at the same time, my best photos are rated very low and my mediocre photos are rated very highly. This makes no sense.

This photo gets a 6.2/10 and is rated negatively for composition, but is actually near perfect (if I'd have a wider angle lens it might have been better). It follows the rule of 3s with reinforcing repetition throughout, including even in the perfectly captured reflections of me taking the photo itself. It's not an /interesting/ photo, but it's practically perfect composition. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/hrbE85wGQWW3vs5w1QoGFg

Keegan is weird.

The scores range is explained in the modal, 5 is for decent pictures, 7-8 for great ones, 9 for exceptional ones. Your average is really good, and all the scores you got are pretty good as well, congratulations! Keegan definitely makes much worse mistakes than these ^^ Ribbons are one time events that have very different thresholds for happening, if you already got a given ribbon on one picture you won't get it again even if your new picture would be an even better fit for it!

Overall aesthetics is a very subjective subject, and getting perfectly accurate scores for it on the wide variety of photos out there is still an open challenge :)

Love how fast this is! Wish it could actually offer advice. Seems heavily biased towards portraits with shallow depths of fields.

Well depending on the picture it may give you very direct tips on what criteria to improve, especially on low score photos (<5).

Fair enough! Few specific issues:

- Can't add pictures to the hall of fame after the fact.

- Can't remove pictures from the hall of fame.

- Re-uploading a ribbon picture doesn't work.

Well these are mostly intended, but are kind of leftover of the phase where we had no user authentication implemented. You can still delete pictures from your profile (https://keegan.regaind.io/profile), that will remove them from Hall of Fame as well. Your ribbon shows there by the way! (ribbons are implemented as one time events which depend on your user status, and are not stored alongside the picture. maybe we could fix that)

Thanks for the report tho, I'll see what we can do for reenabling the hall of fame button after the first show!

http://imgur.com/a/ZwM1N

"Your colors are flat. OK image. You could improve your colors. This deserves a 5.5/10. Not bad, but I'm sure you can do better!"

It's not wrong

That's... strange. My guess is that it's saying this because of the overwhelming amount of green in the background. But taken as a whole this photo is almost a study in color. Clearly the algorithm discounts the artistic value of contrast lighting from the lamp and the differing colors of the rug and bookshelf contrasting with the greenery.

I think you are probably right. It's all CGI btw.

Uploading this photo hangs the system... https://www.flickr.com/photos/nnbb_alf/3181106186/

weird, it worked for me: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/jPERL_ltSqG8WwwCtVlwaA

Ansel Adams 7.5/10 https://keegan.regaind.io/p/uoVo3TIjR1C3P-Q49drUlA

Posted a masterpiece by Stephen Shore, Keegan didn't care for it.

Static composition, my eyes don't really know where to look and the pic is not very exciting… It's flawed, but you'll get there: keep working on your composition and lighting. This is at most 3.8/10. #messy#boring

Here is the photo http://www.fubiz.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/stephenshore...

I have a DSLR and several fairly good lenses and like taking pictures, but I'm by all accounts a layman, and seeing as I'm unfamiliar with that photo, obviously not well versed in the industry.

But honest question: Is that a good picture? I don't assume that the AI is trained enough to give accurate critique on all photos, but in this case I might agree with it.

I'm not trolling nor mean any offense, but is there quantifiable skill behind that photo, or is it just as subjective as painted art? A simple example would be a Pollock painting which I don't care for at all.

Art MA holder here: Pollock is a really good example of the hard-to-pin-down quality of optical balance or energy or "eye". It's a learned thing like most aspects of culture. There are personal variations in "eye" judgement but enough consensus to keep the art market afloat. It does also have something to do with hierarchical structure, fractals etc., especially in Pollock's structurally simple drop paintings. His idea was a conceptual innovation but now does look pretty boring.

You might also dislike Pollock not only for being boring but for being associated with a tedious CIA-sponsored moment in art in the 50s, in which case I applaud you.

I mean, is that a masterpiece? I ask as someone who is unaware of Stephen Shore and has never seen this picture before. As someone living in 2016, that looks like a random picture of a gas station someone took on a road trip. I agree with Keegan here, it's boring.

I'm sure there's some historical context or something I'm missing out on here, but that's just my take looking at the picture.

Stephen Shore is one of my favourites. It might help to think of this image as representative of a body of work, which makes it legible. (and, let's not forget, financially valuable). It's not the greatest Shore image.

Shore has a good "eye", which is something subjective that needs training to develop and recognize. It's very plausible that the particularity of a given artist's "eye" will be quantifiable by AI systems soon.

Shore wrote a popular book called "The Nature of Photographs". Recommended.

I am also unaware of Stephen Shore, and have not seen this picture before. I guess we can chalk it up to different tastes - I think this picture is amazing. It captures the feeling of the place.

How do you know what the feeling of the place is? Have you ever been to that gas station?

It doesn't matter, the point is that a feeling is captured.

Many people seem to think that photography is solely documentary, but that is only one possible aspect. You also have control over what is in and out of the picture, where objects are relative to each other, the relative tones and brightness of objects, etc., and can use that to tell a story that's not strictly true. If you've ever been composing a shot, noticed that there is a big pile of garbage in the frame, and shifted the angle slightly, you're already doing this.

Well...a feeling is captured, not the feeling.

Like all forms of art, the idea is to show the artist's feeling, not to tell you what you would personally feel.

It recognizes food! https://keegan.regaind.io/p/An6jvK-mQxOS-z8bIg8bwQ

Yay I got a ribbon

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/GBjTf_wVRPGsY8A7fmNw6w

As amazing as the advancements to image recognition technology have been, I'm equally astonished of the progress corresponding language generation.

I would be interested to see a Turing test with this tool versus a real photographer analysis.

Restrict the "analysis" to 3 or 4 sentences along with a score. The participant goal would be to figure out which analysis came from the AI and which came from the photographer. Would be interesting to see the results...

Thanks ^_^ as mentioned in the about modal we received a lot of quality help to polish Keegan's language :)

Are you based in Paris? That's great!

We do! We're at Agoranov near Luco, feel free to drop by if you want to have a chat :)

I'd love to! Are you Guillaume?

Are you working on more than classification? What about automatic improvements, including not just lightning but also straightening, cropping, etc.

I'm! You can get in touch with us at hello /at/ regaind.io

You can have a look at your webpage for all that we do (https://regaind.io), but yeah, automatic improvement is on the list of potential things we would like to do :)

>"You nailed the subject placement but that lighting is NOT working. Your portrait could be so much better. Try improving your lighting, background, and blur! No more than a 4.5/10, maybe less. Not so good, but I'm sure you can do better! Try again :)"

Don't know how to do those setting changes on my phone :-) I just posted a selfie on Bart... Bart lighting isn't too flattering

Tasteless and sophomoric though it may be, I decided to feed pornography to Keegan [0].

He seems to like it. 6.5/10 for a generic, raunchy shot.

The point is that pornography is probably the least-composed imaging one can find. It feels like this bot is just spitting out random compliments.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/s5vdh [NSFW, obvioulsy]

Well, the composition is not bad, the colors are more than decent. There's no bad motion blur, the main subject is clear (albeit gross). The score seems decent for that.

Actually, the score scaling is a very tough subject for a public thing. We received some comments saying that Keegan is wayy too harsh, it seems people expect their everyday picture to score 7-8 (we've been told it'd be a big problem in the US especially, I can't judge on that as not living there tho :/), while we feel that Keegan s generally a bit too generous for Europe standards.

Hi,

I might be a particularly tough sell since I grew up in the US but have been living in Europe for quite some time now ;)

I think what you're seeing on is AI hype in action. The marketing of Keegan suggests that it's AI should be capturing some of what is usually perceived as subjective taste (e.g. whether or not the image is "interesting"). This ends up disappointing because the AI (which is clearly an incredible technical feat) is really just capturing objective elements of composition.

Perhaps you just need to fine-tune the language so as to do some expectation management?

On a side note, is it just me or does the character at the top of the page look ominous/creepy?

that's because Keegan can be witty and a bit harsh at times :) but yeah now that you say it I can imagine some creepy memes with him xD

Is he good friends with the Incognito guy?

Tip: you can click the "Get more feedback!" button for a detailed breakdown of scores.

My daughter's cat picture got a 6.6. I know it could use some brightness, but I still love it.

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/-HlqBiO2Qhy2xcWVeetqaA

It likes my dog so much I got an achievement for it: https://keegan.regaind.io/p/g4bTVKBlRlK03OADh4SXog

Well done :p There are 17 hidden achievements with multiple thematic ones like this!

AI fail. https://keegan.regaind.io/p/ij0_ZDpFR92ryOwW5O_xGA

Shoe fetish? https://keegan.regaind.io/p/oAGqMK24Sk6o6jRJZ6CT-A

I tried it with my favorite, Alex Webb. It didn't break 5/10 and received solid #mess and #boring tags on all of the photos. Fun none the less.

Can't wait for the next AI winter...

My test photo got classified as “not a photo”. Keegan may be artificial, but certainly not “intelligent”.

Judge on a single sample, do you ? :) That's a fairly strong statement based on a fairly small dataset :( But yeah, our heuristics to ignore some content (e.g. websites screenshots) sometimes trip on real pictures. There's still a lot of room for improvement :)

Judging by the tags, it recognizes this as a street sign (which is great and amazing), and yet says it's "not a photo".

A photo of a street sign is definitely a photo ;-)

https://keegan.regaind.io/p/v5bCFkeRRYSvendxCM73yA

Yeah it's super harsh with street signs or that kind of large text on pictures. The protection is there to avoid saying really silly stuff on utilities bills and other kinds of paperwork. I'll add this example to the ones we should accept.

I think the subject was hiding in my portrait due to me uploaded a landscape.

Haha do you have the link for that fail?

I was nothing is wrong but could be more. More what?

Hey there! Do you have Keegan's URL for the picture on which you got that comment ?

Sorry, no.

Well. This is trippy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com