I've been playing around with an image processing website today called Deep Dream Generator. Actually I think the website has been around since 2015 so its not exactly new, but it is new for me.
Deep dream is some sort of artificial intelligence program created by Google. In simple terms, it uses an algorithim to enhance images and create another dream like psychedelic image. Google made the program open source and now there are various apps who have developed it.
Deep Dream Generator is one of these sites. According to their website:
Deep Dream Generator is a set of tools which make it possible to explore different AI algorithms. We focus on creative tools for visual content generation like those for merging image styles and content or such as Deep Dream which explores the insight of a deep neural network.
Did that explain it better than I did?
The Deep Dream Generator site is a bit like Steemit actually. There's a trending page, your feed from users you follow, and the latest images. You can "like" the public images just like all other social media. The only difference from Steemit is you don't get paid for your creation or likes. This image is currently the top liked post of the week. There's 253 likes, so I don't know how big the user base is.
I like the way how they present the public images, I think its very good. On the top left is the original image the user uploads to the site. The bottom left is the dream style, and the main image is the creation. That's very useful if you see something you really like and want to recreate the effect with your own image.
Wanna see my own page? This is what it currently looks like. I just registered today and am a newbie, so am restricted to how many images I can create each hour. Once you move up the membership levels and you can create more images, and share them with everyone else. These membership levels doesn't cost anything, just your engagement on the site. This is particularly for the Dreamers and Deep Dreamers. It's fair to be rewarded if you get more likes for your work.
Now for the fun part. It's really very easy to generate your own images. You can choose between deep style, thin style and deep dream. Deep style a 0.36MP resolution and thin styles 0.6MP. Deep dream style has something to do with the Neural Network ie the Deep Dream AI program. I tried to read up about the neural network but it got too complicated for me so I gave up. Anyway, what I grasped was that the whole image generation process is quite resource intensive, that's why they restrict the number of images you can do each hour. That's fair enough in my opinion, as it is a free service after all - unless you want to become a patron. Not sure what additional benefit you get, but it's unlikely I will be taking up the offer.
Anyway, back to generating images. I uploaded one single image to the site and selected different options from each of the three styles to see what dream like psychedelic image I would end up with. It took a few minutes to generate the deep style, and about a minute or so for the thin style and deep dream. I'm not sure why the deep style took longer when the resolution is lower, or maybe it was my computer being a bit slow?
This is the deep dream image
And these are the other other images, the deep style ones at 0.36MP resolution
And the thin style ones at 0.6MP resolution
I've deliberately used the same image for all my creations so I can try out the different effects and see how the dream like psychedelic image differs. Before I forget, this is my original image...
The deep dream generator is great to play around with images, especially for noobs like me. It's a great past time when you want to relax, and so far every generated image has been a bit of a surprise. I have yet to explore its full potential and can't make any of my images public yet as I'm still a newbie. I will be able to do it tomorrow, so it will be intresting to see what the "like" culture is. Other than that,the only negative I have about it is the the size of the images. They are too low, so if you're a perfectionist or want to use the images for other crreative work, they won't be much use. But for a past time, it will suffice.
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