Turn photos into paintings with deepart.io

Recently I came across a very interesting website: deepart.io. There you can convert your own photos into a painting in the style of any artist. All you need is your own photo and a picture as a style template from which the photo is to be transformed. On the website, you can also view the pictures of other users and, if you want, use them again as your own template.

The algorithm was developed by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker and Matthias Bethge and is based on so-called "Deep Learning", a special field of artificial intelligence. In the meantime, there is also a variant of the software that you could theoretically run on your own PC, but the hardware requirements are so high that even on a very well-equipped PC you can only convert images in quite low resolution. However, the team has managed to optimise the algorithm to produce high resolution images that are easily sufficient for a 50x50 cm print and offer this service on their website.

At first I was quite sceptical whether it would really work. But after trying out a few photos myself, I was really enthusiastic. However, the fun also has a catch, namely the price. Only a small picture with a logo in a maximum size of 500x500 pixels is free. And even then you have to wait 3-4 days. With 2 euros, you can speed things up considerably and download the picture after just 15 minutes. For a resolution of 1.7 megapixels you have to pay 19 euros and a picture with 9 megapixels costs 149 euros!

Do painters now have to seriously worry about their future? Of course not. The algorithm can imitate the style of a picture extremely well, but that's all it can do. It neither understands the content of the painting nor can it be used to create a completely new work of art.

Finally, a few examples that I have tried out: