[HN Gopher] Show HN: Creating custom coloring pages from photos....
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Creating custom coloring pages from photos. Great for
parents/teachers
Making coloring pages out of your own personal photos is a fun and
creative way to engage kids (and adults!) with art. Instead of
generic coloring pages, you can turn special memories into custom
works of art just waiting to be filled in with color.
Author : stevels
Score : 163 points
Date : 2024-03-13 03:09 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (portraitart.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (portraitart.app)
| derwiki wrote:
| Could be neat, but I'm really dissuaded by requiring an email
| signup to try it out
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Use a personal domain with a default address that filters to a
| mailbox then use a different email address for every site you
| use. This plus random passwords from a password manager
| contains the privacy leakage, blast radius of credential loss,
| and keeps your mail spam free.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Or, you know, just don't normalize indiscriminate email
| collection as a filter for using a service.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Ship sailed? Your solo rage boycott won't change the
| incentive structure of the universe. Thus adblockers, black
| hole email addresses, etc. Using the service without
| providing back the value also creates incentive to avoid
| the dark pattern in a way that's a stronger reinforcement
| than simply not using.
| stevels wrote:
| Have to send user notification in email, because the processing
| queue could be long.
| cuu508 wrote:
| A progress bar on the website would do. And if the user
| closes a browser tab, you can cancel their job.
| latexr wrote:
| Or just keep a cookie to know which job to show if the user
| comes back. You don't even need a cookie banner for
| something that simple with no personal information.
| askl wrote:
| They don't validate the email, so just register with
| whatever@portraitart.app and let them spam themselves.
| po wrote:
| IMO your FAQ needs an entry for: when you store uploaded photos,
| what will they be used for. Will my uploaded photos be used as
| training data for your AI models for example?
| afro88 wrote:
| First thing I wanted to do was upload a family photo for my
| son. But of course, I don't want my family photo used for
| anything...
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Agreed. The site should automatically delete the uploaded
| photos after a set amount of minutes or seconds. No reason to
| store them.
| stevels wrote:
| Right now, we keep it for user to access it later. User can
| choose to delete the photo and all associated pictures, as
| explained in https://portraitart.app/help
|
| We do not use the data for other purpose.
|
| This is a good suggestion. We will definitely think about
| how to design the UI to satisfy both.
| sverhagen wrote:
| If you don't want a site to (possibly) store your photos,
| not uploading them in the first place may be your only
| _real_ option...
| stevels wrote:
| Good suggestion. We do not used the data for training. We will
| clarify that in FAQ.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Don't hide it away in the FAQ, that information should be
| front and center during the upload process.
| stevels wrote:
| Due to high demand, the processing time is higher than usual.
| Need to wait for your result in email notification.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| what language / image libraries did you use to build this? thanks
| jakewins wrote:
| I think this is just a thin wrapper around GPT-4 or similar?
| Parents I know have replaced colouring books by just asking
| GPT-4 , and the colouring pages it generates look exactly like
| the example outputs here.
| stevels wrote:
| Those coloring books are generated by text prompting. Here we
| let you create coloring pages from your own photos. Related
| but different.
| toonewbie wrote:
| GPT-4 supports images as input.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Feels more likely this is the opposite - the "originals" look
| like hallucinations.. what is the rear suspension attached to on
| this "bmw"[0]? Presumably it's supposed to be an R60[1]. It
| magically has a lot more (accurate) parts in the colouring
| page[2] (bigger front and back fender, seat, engine gets fins,
| frame changed shape, tail has license plate holder and signals,
| the front brake is connected to the leaver via a cable). At least
| these six fingered people[3] deserve each other - shame she moved
| her wedding ring, Inigo Montoya seeks them.
|
| [0]:
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/motorcycle1_original_...
| [1]: https://wallup.net/1960-bmw-r60-classic-bike-motorbike/ [2]:
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/motorcycle1_coloring_...
| [3]:
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/wedding1_coloring_pag...
| stevels wrote:
| Good catch! You are really into the details.
| kazinator wrote:
| Did you see the goose's feet? One is a wine glass stem kind of
| a thing, or a liquid pour; the other is a pyramid.
| YeahThisIsMe wrote:
| The suspension is attached to the rounded bar next to it. You
| can find more pictures of it using Google.
| jotaen wrote:
| The BMW R60 image appears to be CGI / 3D-rendered. If you zoom
| in on the original[1], you can see how the rear suspension is
| attached.
|
| [1]: https://www.pexels.com/photo/orange-and-black-bmw-
| motorcycle...
| newman8r wrote:
| used a fake email, but when the processing was done, it didn't
| work and asked me to pay for something.
| stevels wrote:
| The tool is not perfect. Sometimes it does not fully understand
| the image content. Also, right now, the image is slightly
| watermarked, but perfectly fine for using as coloring page.
|
| And it seems personalized coloring page is very popular, we
| actually just decided to make the coloring pages free of
| watermarks, as our minor contribution to education. Will change
| the code to make that happen soon (in a few days).
| newman8r wrote:
| Sure - I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining - I think
| the tool could be very neat. Would be great to be able to use
| it easily without any email, at least for the initial trial.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Or, you can just ask openAI directly. That way only they have
| your holiday pictures, instead of adding a third party of unknown
| trustworthiness to the mix.
| mosselman wrote:
| Any prompt I can use?
| mock-possum wrote:
| > enter your email
|
| Nope
| zevv wrote:
| Just fill in pa-contact@photofairy.ai for the address.
| vidarh wrote:
| My immediate issue, as the father of a mixed son who has just
| witnessed him spend hours trying to represent his own appearance
| accurately for an art task at school:
|
| This turns black and mixed people into white-presenting
| caricatures of themselves. E.g. compare [1] and [2] where the
| hairstyles of the black people are turned into distinctly "white"
| hairstyles. My son's hair is closer in texture to that of the man
| on the right, and there's no way of getting it into the shape of
| the coloring-in page.
|
| I get there's no ill intent here, but even for far less
| ethnically ambiguous inputs this "whitewashes" hairstyles and
| general appearance, and once I saw it I couldn't unsee it.
|
| If my son was the age to want to use this, I'd be concerned about
| letting him use this, because I know he is sensitive about how he
| is different to his friends, etc. and this would wildly
| misrepresent and erase his actual appearance.
|
| [3] and [4] is another stark example.
|
| [5] and [6]....
|
| [1]
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/group1_original_1024....
|
| [2]
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/group1_coloring_page_...
|
| [3]
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/portrait4_original_10...
|
| [4]
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/portrait4_coloring_pa...
|
| [5]
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/basketball2_original_...
|
| [6]
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/basketball2_coloring_...
| hk1337 wrote:
| Honestly, when I first started reading your comment I thought
| you were being over sensitive but I totally get it looking at
| pictures 3 and 4. Even 5 and 6 completely changes the
| hairstyle.
| vidarh wrote:
| I had to look for multiple examples myself before I was sure
| I wasn't being oversensitive. As I said, I'm sure there's no
| ill intent, and in a way I'm not surprised either, because as
| my son himself found out, if you're going to draw line art -
| especially with clear, thick lines like this, then accurately
| representing black or mixed hair without it turning into a
| caricature that'd be even worse is a skill.
|
| And one that is very likely underrepresented in the training
| set for no fault of theirs.
|
| And this is why getting diversity "right" (so not the Gemini
| fiasco way) is hard - you can be extremely well meaning and
| just not have it register until someone for whom it's
| personal looks at it.
| rob74 wrote:
| Looks like it takes considerable "artistic license" to
| deviate from the photos. Every person getting turned into a
| stereotypical "caucasian" type is the most noticeable (and
| most problematic), but also the spotted cat in one of the
| pictures gets a "stereotypical" tabby coat. Also, it likes
| to insert a horizon, even if the original image doesn't
| have one, and sometimes it completely changes what's in the
| background. But I assume this is because of the images in
| the training set - I guess in coloring books most people
| have light-colored hair (which can then be colored brown,
| black, red... whatever) and the model then associates that
| with stereotypical blondes?
|
| There are several modes (https://portraitart.app/portrait-
| art) - some of them are better at keeping people looking
| like they originally look, the "coloring page" mode seems
| to be the most "heavy-handed"...
|
| It also doesn't like freckles: https://portraitart.app/stat
| ic/gallery/portrait6_original_10... -> https://portraitart.
| app/static/gallery/portrait6_pencilsketc...
|
| After some further browsing, the "caricature" mode seems to
| be the strangest - caricatures are supposed to take the
| characteristic traits of a person and exaggerate them in a
| humorous way, while these images sometimes lack even the
| slightest resemblance to the original. For example, this
| mixed race couple https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/co
| uple1_original_1024... is not only turned into two
| brunettes https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/couple1_ca
| ricature_10..., but they also have a different pose,
| different hairstyle and wear completely different
| clothes...
| pbronez wrote:
| Thanks for calling this out. I think the dev cycle for
| production AI Systems will involve a lot of bug squashing
| on this kind of thing. These models handle a huge variety
| of inputs; by definition much more than you could hand
| code. It's hard to even identify systematic failures.
|
| Once a failure mode is known - like here - how do you fix
| it? The foundational problem is minorities are a minority
| of the training set. Good training data is expensive, so
| how can we practically boost representation without getting
| the Gemini fiasco?
|
| One idea: start with the best coloring books. Presumably
| some human has mastered the art of "accurately representing
| black or mixed hair without it turning into a caricature".
| Find them, and start buying their art. When they have
| drawings based on photos, use that training pair. When they
| have line art only, use a style transfer tool (like this
| one!) to convert to a photo. That gives you another pair
| for use in the other direction.
|
| Another idea: make it easy to users to flag poor transfers.
| Add a "whitewashed" option to the standard mod report flow.
| Feed that into RLHF. Get better.
|
| Another idea: focus dev cycles on this. Once you have a
| system to flag problems and address them, use all this
| fancy AI to identify input photos with black/mixed hair.
| Manually inspect how the model performs and push feedback
| into the next training cycle.
|
| One tool for this is https://www.aquariumlearning.com/
|
| The point is - once you identify a corner of feature space
| where things break, you can fix them.
| vidarh wrote:
| > Presumably some human has mastered the art of
| "accurately representing black or mixed hair without it
| turning into a caricature"
|
| There absolutely are good examples, yes, and I think
| you're right that the failure of capturing it is largely
| down to volume in the extant datasets, and particularly
| in datasets that provide a direct match for the type of
| line-art colouring in style, which is in itself fairly
| dated.
|
| I agree with all of your recommendations. I think it's
| definitely a problem that will be solved. The main thing
| is for people to get used to looking for it.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It's galling for me once pointed out because I know that a
| lot of black people have totally different hair to the
| degree that it's a separate skill to cut that hair versus
| white people hair. I knew someone who would only have her
| sister cut her hair because none of the stylists in town
| could cut it without ruining the shape. They'd use the same
| tools and techniques as with perfectly straight hair and
| would destroy it. The hair is something that seems
| intensely personal and to have it erased and morphed so
| completely is really broken.
| SamBam wrote:
| This was absolutely my first reaction as well. I scrolled
| through the first few photos of White families where it seemed
| to turn even _them_ into 1950s caricatures of "small town
| White Americans" and thought "hmmm, how's it going to treat
| Black people?"
|
| I was not at all surprised when it turned Black people into
| White people.
|
| This to me is one of the clearest examples I've seen of what
| people talk about when they talk about biases in training data.
| Clearly the training data of "coloring books" is heavily biased
| towards "stereotypical 1950s white people" and turns everyone
| into them.
|
| (And you can add [1] and [2] to your list of comparison
| images.)
|
| 1.
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/father1_original_1024...
|
| 2.
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/father1_coloring_page...
| vidarh wrote:
| The artistic license thing in itself I think is fine if only
| it didn't go just one direction. And you may very well be
| right that the examples it may have seen of coloring books
| may well be a very peculiar subset.
| latexr wrote:
| "Artistic license" assumes agency, that there is some
| artist who understands the facts of a situation and
| deliberately changes them in the work.
|
| It does not apply to a machine doing a poor job because it
| lacks context in its training data. Just like medieval art,
| which was inaccurate1 due to _ignorance_ , not because the
| person doing the drawing decided to add some flare.
|
| 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnB2Uj7gWSE
| mkummer wrote:
| With less "artistic license" [1]
|
| We use a model but not a diffusion model + controlnet which is
| what I'm assuming this website does.
|
| Would love any feedback on the results + site [2] - before it's
| asked: we do not use any user uploaded images for model
| training, they're only stored to show you the color version of
| your originally uploaded image
|
| [1] https://static.dreamandcolor.com/aa828ad1-5696-4d4e-95eb-
| bcd...
|
| [2] https://dreamandcolor.com/
| codingdave wrote:
| It still has the vibe of janky edge-detection that can be
| done without AI. Admittedly, less janky than pure edge
| detection but still not quite smooth enough that I'd pay for
| the results.
|
| Also, just FYI, asking three different time across these
| comments for people to check out your site feels a bit spammy
| to me. I'd suggest you do your own 'Show HN' if you are
| trying to engage with the community here for feedback.
| mkummer wrote:
| Fair, thanks for your feedback - some images work better
| than others in terms of the artifacting. There's lots of
| improvements we'd like to make, for now the best balance
| I've found is letting the user choose their level of detail
| on the site and add any masking lines as needed before PDF
| export
| djleni wrote:
| It turned my black dog into a beagle!
| jotaen wrote:
| Another - presumably coincidental - issue with images [1] and
| [2] is that there is a person missing. I assume that's not
| related to skin colour, but to me it adds to the slightly
| irritating effect of how the resulting images may be
| disconnected from human reality in ways that would commonly be
| understood as disrespectful. (Not to speak of the "usual" AI
| problems, such as additional fingers, stray body parts, etc.)
|
| [1]:
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/group1_original_1024....
|
| [2]:
| https://portraitart.app/static/gallery/group1_coloring_page_...
| hacb wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out, seriously. As a white european
| guy, I'd probably never have thought of this issue, that's an
| important reminder about our biases
| kitchen_sink wrote:
| When I was just starting out I made a similar app
| (https://github.com/rmdocherty/buck3t) using classic computer
| vision operations like k-means and Canny edge detection rather
| than (I assume) ML. It also lets you fill in the returned
| coloring page in the browser.
|
| It's simple and works relatively well but is prone to fail on
| high frequency objects like foliage, where the ML approach
| appears to a) succeed and b) stylise (seems to cause problems).
|
| The free trial on the cloud function expired so the web app
| doesn't work and the source JS code is awful but someone (maybe
| me) could pretty easily rewrite the cloud function into a flask
| server to allow local hosting.
| codingdave wrote:
| Same here - I had a web-based system that let you do coloring
| pages, paint-by-number, cross-stitch patterns, etc... and it
| all worked in the web session. While adding an AI element does
| give improvements over my results. I'm not sure those
| improvements are worth being prompted for my email, waiting
| even longer for results, the results not being 100% true to the
| original content, and not having those results just show on-
| screen.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Tangentially related, I want to make a comic strip. I have some
| questions for people knowledgeable in "prompt engineering":
|
| 1. What's the style name for dilbert-like comic strips? Comic?
| Line art?
|
| 2. How do I produce consistent characters throughout the "comic
| box" and episodes?
|
| 3. How do I hint the generation of the comic? E.g. I draw a stick
| figure of someone sitting, and it generates my character with
| that pose.
|
| 4. How do I "refine" some parts of the generated image. For
| example I like the generated character, but I want the face to
| look different direction.
| Zetobal wrote:
| 1. You probably won't hit 100% parity just by prompt
| engineering especially if you want to do your points 3-4. You
| would need to train a style LoRa.
|
| 2. You can use one of the many ip-adapter models but the best
| result would probably be a combination of ip-adapter + subject
| LoRa.
|
| 3. That would be a controlnet model probably sketch best
| results would be achieved (for poses) using open or dw pose
| models.
|
| 4. You would do that with inpainting or stable drag.
|
| https://stable-diffusion-art.com is a good starting point.
| vidarh wrote:
| > 1. What's the style name for dilbert-like comic strips?
| Comic? Line art?
|
| I don't think there's a clear settled name for that specific
| style, but I'd describe it as an American newspaper strip with
| low levels of detail and inspiration from "ligne claire" (Ligne
| claire is the style of Tintin etc. - focuses on strong, clear
| lines with a lot of details omitted, rarely shading very rarely
| hatching; e.g. hair in Ligne Claire is usually described by its
| borders - even messy hair is mostly hinted at by tufts sticking
| out, with the rest flat shaded).
|
| American newspaper strips by no means always use simple line
| work, so describing it as that in isolation is unlikely to
| work, but it has other characteristics (which are by no means
| _universal_ - this is a regular complication in categorizing
| this), such as often omitting backgrounds, or just hinting at
| backgrounds (e.g. with a picture hanging on a wall being all
| you see of the wall), and often using panels that change little
| or sometimes not at all during a conversational exchange
| (basically strips have a lot of characteristics around
| streamlining works for artists on a deadline that 's often a
| major stress factor, so lots of simplification, but _what_
| requires simplification to same the artist time will vary
| greatly).
|
| But there is variation there too, and especially very
| significant variation between the classic single-strip-a-day
| format and the Sunday format with a bigger panel, where you
| often end up seeing non-traditional layout or characters
| "bursting out" of individual frames in various ways where the
| single strips are often far more regimented. Many comics do
| both, and will sometimes look very different between the two.
|
| E.g. Calvin and Hobbes strips are fairly regimented, usually
| four panels of near uniform size, while the Sunday panels were
| renowned for breaking "rules" with uneven, sometimes
| overlapping panels, and drawings bursting out of them - the
| last ever Calvin and Hobbes consists of 3 or 5 or 7 frames
| depending on how you count - the first frame contains another
| frame, which contains a drawing, which contains another frame
| with a drawing. The two top outer frames don't even align with
| the bottom outer frame... [1]
|
| You almost certainly would need to try multiple things and add
| additional descriptors to get the specific feel you want.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-
| entertainment/2020/12/31...
| krapp wrote:
| >1. What's the style name for dilbert-like comic strips? Comic?
| Line art?
|
| "style of Scott Adams."
| latexr wrote:
| > #1 Photo to Art App
|
| According to whom? There's just that sentence, surrounded by
| laurel leaves, above five stars. Zero indication of where that
| award/rating came from. Did you make it up?
| xnx wrote:
| This one calls itself "#1 AI coloring page generator"
| https://colorbliss.art/
| latexr wrote:
| So they're both confidently making stuff up without any
| sources or justification. Quite on brand for the current
| generation of generative AI.
| preinheimer wrote:
| The coloring page that should have shown my son and daughter
| sitting on a bench that looked like a bear waving magic wands...
| turned my son into a girl with Princess Leia hair, and my
| daughter into a anthropomorphized bear, no wands.
|
| Fun, but it's no longer a special memory. There's so little tying
| the source and result.
| DannyPage wrote:
| I really think this should have GenAI in the title on the webpage
| or on here, because it's taking the source photo and making best
| guesses while creating details out of whole cloth. This isn't
| just "another photo filter", it's instead taking the picture and
| running with it with sometimes pretty poor results.
|
| For example, I used a random selfie of me on the beach and big
| rocks in the water, wearing dark sunglasses and mouth closed.
|
| Watercolor: Added eyes to my glasses (!). The rocks and water
| turned green, and it looked like I was standing in a park.
| Coloring Page: Ferns and trees added that weren't there before.
| Both: Gave me a teethy smile when my lips were closed.
|
| The examples on the home page must have been extremely handpicked
| because I'm not seeing anything to that same fidelity.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Heh, I used a photo of myself sitting on the couch with my
| chihuahua looking up at me over my laptop screen and it
| replaced her with a St Bernard. The hallucination is strong in
| this one.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| When I saw this posted late last night, I was pretty excited
| since I have kids, but then realized it's just determining the
| basic idea of what it sees in the photo, and then drawing a new
| image from scratch that has those elements. What I wanted is
| something that takes the original photo and removes things from
| the image until we're left with some basic line drawings, so
| that the people in the coloring book actually look like the
| people in the photo! Their examples very obviously show how
| different the resulting image is from the original. If Google
| allowed you to search by saying "Find me a coloring book image
| where a dad is sitting behind 2 kids with his arms around them,
| and the daughter is on the left and the son is on the right"
| then we'd end up with results almost as good.
|
| I'm no Photoshop expert, but someone else in this discussion
| pointed out that Photoshop has some filters or other tools that
| do edge detection and can yield much more accurate results. If
| the techniques could be replicated in a SaaS then you'd have a
| much better product. Of course, if it could be done in a
| desktop Mac app or an iOS app, I might choose that for privacy
| reasons.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If Google allowed you to search by saying "Find me a
| coloring book image where a dad is sitting behind 2 kids with
| his arms around them, and the daughter is on the left and the
| son is on the right" then we'd end up with results almost as
| good._
|
| I've been using Stable Diffusion, and more recently Bing
| (app) and now GPT-4/Dall-E 3 (ChatGPT app) for that very
| purpose, with quite good success rate. It's perfect for when
| my daughter randomly asks me for a coloring page with a
| dancing vacuum cleaner or such. Dall-E is quite good at this,
| all you need to do is tack "in the style of a children
| coloring book" or such to the end of your prompt.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Does anyone know of a site that works without the gimmicky AI?
| Like it always seems to switch the sides of people, changing
| major details, etc. I just want a coloring page of the actual
| image I upload, not some AI's interpretation of it with creative
| licensing.
| mkummer wrote:
| You could try out our site [1] - we use an AI model but not a
| diffusion model (like OP is) to convert photos to line art, the
| resulting lines are less "smooth" but it better represents the
| original image
|
| [1] https://dreamandcolor.com/
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I wonder if the backlash against "AI" will grow to be enough to
| keep us from hell.
| cameron_b wrote:
| Right now we hear
|
| Libera te ... me ...
|
| Soon we'll hear
|
| libera te tutemet ex inferis
| chad_strategic wrote:
| On a positive note. I have fond memories of my wife and son
| coloring at the dining room table during the pandemic. I look
| forward to trying this out.
| hyperific wrote:
| For significantly less compute you could make pretty good
| coloring book pages just using different edge detection methods
| or simply using the stamp filter in Photoshop.
| mhuffman wrote:
| I actually used this exact method in the early 2000s to make
| "coloring books" for local businesses using their own
| photographs. They would give them out and use them for
| marketing.
| jwineinger wrote:
| I uploaded a picture of my dog and none of the styles looked like
| HER. They were just some generic dog in the same pose as mine.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| Seems like a stupid use of AI
| whalesalad wrote:
| I was wanting to build a tool like this to transform photos into
| templates for doing stained glass work. This is very cool.
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| Super annoying... needs an email
|
| You lost your opportunity, you can now go back to anonimity.
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(page generated 2024-03-13 23:02 UTC)