Idea: Obscura

Synopsis:

• Instagram circa early 2010s, but instead of filters that apply color changes from a LUT or something, each filter is a different direction in the Stable Diffusion latent space.
• Main technical challenge here would be editing real images while preserving fidelity to the original, especially on things like human faces, but I think that’s a solved problem in a few months. Imagic achieves this, sort of, but takes a long time (~5-6mins on a top-of-the-line datacenter GPU).

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Paper (the classic iPad drawing app). They gave you like a color palette of 15 colors, the most simple color mixer in the world (and no color picker otherwise), and like 5 "brushes" that were like pencil, pen, watercolor. Super simple. As simple as possible. But it was very hard using those tools to make something that looked ugly. What if you could build images by capturing the basics of an idea from a napkin sketch or something in front of you, and then use like 5-10 "style filters" in the Stable Diffusion latent space to "artsify" it in a way that was hard to mess up?