Turn photo into painting: introduction to photopaint.us

Ever since the publication of neural style, there are a few different websites and smart phone apps leveraging this technology to stylize photo into artistic paints. deepart.io is based on the optimization approach, which is takes tens of minutes or even hours to render high resolution pictures. The advantage is that user can upload any style image they want and create a painting with the style they upload. The popular app prisma, on the other hand, is based on the fast neural style approach. It can render stylized images in seconds, but the style model can take 6 hours or more to train on a high performance GPU computer.

photopaint.us, however, is based on a technology that combines the advantage of both approaches. It can render high resolution stylized images in seconds, but it can also create new style models in a reasonably short time, around 1 hour. This technology allows photopaint.us to provide a large number of style models (around 90 style models for now), and it also allow users to submit their new style images to photopaint.us@gmail.com, and the site administrator will train and add the new style in a day or so.

Another feature of photopaint.us is that it allows users to render high resolution images with the largest side of the image up to 2500px. High resolution is particularly important when there are people in the photo. Consider the following example. The original photo look like this:

When using the non-premium service of photopaint.us, which result in a image with 768px on the largest side, the stylized images look like this:

We can clearly see that the face of the mother and the child is blurred due to the low resolution. When using premium service, which allows image with largest side up to 2500px, the photo rendered with the same style look like this. We can see how clearly the details of the faces, and the people in the image look much nicer comparing with the low resolution image.

In the following few blog post, I am going to demonstrate the capabilities of photopaint.us, and some useful tips on how to choose appropriate styles and resolutions when stylizing your photos into paintings.