I decided to focus on the selfie 2 anime GAN photo manipulating program on Runway ML. I found the results quite hilarious because in most cases it failed entirely to deliver on the promise of realistic anime stylized images. I found some of my results closer to a Picasso rendition than an anime style. The resulting images more so just blocked out certain colors and bumped up the saturation, while fun looking I can’t quite say that they recognized the facial features as easily as in the reference images. A version of this filter also exists on Snapchat and works much more consistently and live, but using it for a bit I can tell that it’s pulling from a database of hairstyles, face shapes, and tracking them onto the face whereas this uses a GAN to tweak the image and until it is considered “anime style”
