I've heard people say that not everyone is born an artist, I prefer to think that anyone can create art. Some are more adept at painting, while others make music. But with recent advances in technologies like style transfer, almost anyone can enjoy the pleasure that comes along with creating and sharing an artistic masterpiece.
Neural style transfer is an optimization technique used to take two images—a content image and a style reference image (such as an artwork by a famous painter)—and blend them together so that the output image looks like the content image, but “painted” in the style of the style reference image.
In other words, in Neural Style Transfer we have two images- style and content. We need to copy the style from the style image and apply it to the content image. By style we basically mean, the patterns, the brushstrokes, etc.
Below you can see a photo I took on my way home. This is the content image.
"Style transfer is a computer vision technique that allows us to recompose the content of an image in the style of another. If you’ve ever imagined what a photo might look like if it were painted by a famous artist, then style transfer is the computer vision technique that turns this into a reality." - FRITZ AI
During the creative process and after selecting the content image we need to look for a style image and imagine the possible outcome of mixing them. This is the most magical part of the process. After we have chosen our images we let the neural network a.k.a. artificial intelligence do the rest.
Below is the image I used as style which is an artwork by Amy Giacomelli:
While the AI is processing and painting your masterpiece you have no idea if it will result as you imagined but the feeling is very special.. I might compare it to waiting for your baby to be born because you can't wait to see him.
Below you can see the result:
I might not have much talent with the paintbrush, but I definitely enjoy creating this digital paintings and being able to share them. My biggest surprise was to find out that there are many AI artists using this technology to create amazing digital paintings. An AI painting was recently sold for $432,500.!
I hope that you enjoyed reading this article.!
