Show HN: Create a portrait painting from one photo
drawbert.ai
drawbert.ai
Professional artists generally don't see great value in the style of art exemplified by these AI-powered image generators. It tends to be formulaic, derivative, and melodramatic with all the high-contrast portraits and sunsets and oversaturated pastoral landscapes. But popular taste has been in many ways stuck a century or more in the past.
Now that these styles can be generated at the click of a button, it's far easier for even laypersons to see them as essentially canned forms of expression. I wonder if this augurs a larger shift in artistic taste. The introduction of photography fundamentally changed what people want from human-made images, and AI could have almost as far-reaching effects.
But on the other hand, probably 99% of what professional illustrators do isn't, and doesn't need to be, great Art either.
They're just trying to quickly produce a hero illustration for an article, or turn an author headshot into a simpler sketch, or add some appropriate clothing to a background NPC. Being "formulaic" and "derivative" and a "canned form of expression" here is a feature, not a bug.
Which is why generative AI seems so great to me.
In terms of "kitsch" -- yeah I'd never in a million years hang something AI-generated on my wall as if it were fine art produced by a human soul trying to express something.
And I think the creator of Drawbert should focus entirely on this being a tool for being professional portraits for business and branding use, rather than "stunning portraits" or "masterpiece paintings". The former is what it actually is, the latter it ain't.
Just because most people create things that you categorise as kitsch should not fool you into thinking that's an inherent limitation. There's almost no limit to the kind of images that can be created given the right input.
Unless you want to define kitsch as "anything that an AI image generator is capable of producing"?
Although many image generators now seem to be fine-tuned to output impressive but formulaic art by default, to ensure a good first-impression for a broad audience.
Midjourney for example has always been great at generating very "cool" art easily, but seems to be less versatile and always tends towards that same people-pleasing style.
Sadly it's become quite hard to run some of these due to bit rot and the fact that "pinning your Python dependencies" doesn't appear to have ever been a thing for large sections of the ML dev community.
But now that it’s so easy to generate, will it mean a shift in taste? The current crop of AI art looks the same because enough people think those limited styles are good. But in ten years, users may be a lot more demanding.
Think about 1950s pop music, before the invention of electric guitars and synthesizers and sequencers. The range of musical expression is quite limited to modern ears. But at the time, it was uncontested among ordinary listeners that “good music” had that particular sound. There was an enormous gulf between avant garde contemporary music and pop music, just like in art today.
Also there's nothing inherent in currently popular style that makes it “canned expression”; is used for canned expression because it’s popular; when popular tastes shift, so does canned expression; that's how commercial vs. fine art moves.
If AI changes the details of that other than accelerating the process, it’ll probably be by a “Latinum is valuable because you can't replicate it” effect, which probably won’t hit exactly where what current professional artist see as most interesting is any more than it will hit where current populat art is.
That is very subjective. Mass market art loses appeal fast, popular turns common, what is unique steals the spotlight and tastes change.
I can see best quality AI generated custom portraits being as pleasant to look at as selfies.
People have distorted/blurred/abstracted images from the start with 'Vaseline on the lens' to airbrushing to modern concerns about 4k showing too much detail. Popular art wants to remove the detail and portray the subject as better-than.
I don't know if I'd call the portraits "stunning" but this is exactly the type of image that is extremely useful to use as an author portrait on a blog or publication, in a list of employees on a startup's team page, and so forth.
You can compare with Wall Street Journal hedcuts [1] or the portraits in the Economist's "By Invitation" [2].
Because actual photos often reveal "too much", with a lot of distracting detail not relevant to your "essence", and you're never going to get a series of photos of different people to look all that consistent unless you're using the same photographer with the same setup in the same location, which usually isn't practical.
So this kind of tool that accurately reproduces someone's face and expression and hair accurately, but stylizes the rest, is actually super useful in communicating just the right amount of visual information in a lot of professional contexts.
So kudos to the creator -- I think you might be able to turn this into a business if you market this to businesses that want to use images of their employees, where the business pays to decide on a particular consistent "look", and then can just feed in and update images of employees/reporters as needed. Charge something like $199 to define the look, and then $99/yr for portraits based on up to 100 original photo uploads per year, $179/yr for 200 photos, etc.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-in-a-hedcut-depends-how-i...
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://drawbert.ai:1000/convert. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 502.
after ~2 mins
I assume this is using newer generative techniques like stable diffusion.
It is important in service like this.
Missing privacy policy, no physical address et. will get you flagged as scam site in EU pretty fast.
After that, the only people needing the address would be the state to have on file to send correspondence regarding the business. At that point, so many businesses have an address in another state/country to yet again make that address meaningless. Not really sure what your point in thinking a physical address is meaningful.
It is one of the best ways to validate valid business from scam sites.
There is a point for human person location, usually which can be verified. If the location is real, you are unlikely to scam someone, as there is certain way to reach them.
Anyway, in EU it is mandated that company has registered physical address.
There are plenty of services offered to companies that provide a physical address that is nothing more than a wall of mail boxes and a person on staff to sign/accept packages while providing a physical address that gives the appearance of legitimacy.
With shell company you might be able to get scammed indeed, but that already makes it much harder and rises the bar.
The state is not the only entity to which this concern applies.
Well it has been almost 24h now, and it is still not up. I think it is concerning that you did not put up a simple "we immediately delete the images you upload and we do not store any data about you, nor do we track you using cookies or share data with third parties".
Since you do not have a privacy policy, I would expect that you do not do any of these things. So why not write this?
I'll endeavor to package everything up and post a repo in the near future, this sort of low effort sass stuff really irritates me. I'll do my best to replicate this functionality in a easy to use open source UI/UX
Why? There's a big world out there with people who don't know any of these words (controlnets, stable diffusion, open source,...) and it's probably targeted at these.
You can also do much the same with imagemagic, no AI required.
How many magazine covers do you see and actually believe that was anything close to what the original image looked like? I have no idea how long this thing takes, but I'm guessing it's helluva lot faster than a person in PS, and it will be doable with anybody with zero amount of talent required.
To think it couldn't be done in PS is just lack of knowing good PS artists.
Your interpretation of the original comment into saying it was simple is a bit skewed
I know the filters you're talking about, and they can certainly turn photos into some faux-artistic effects, but the result is really bad, and everything in the image remains in the exact same place.
This is applying an actual artistic style, and also changing body position, background, hair, lighting, etc.
So I don't know why you'd want to be so dismissive of something like this.
Not sure the power costs of running a model like this over the caloric costs of a human + the power to power their photoshop machine, for instance, is worth it.
Saying they look the same is like saying Nintendo 64 graphics look the same as PlayStation 5 graphics. It's just incorrect.