AI Photo-to-Illustration Transform for Arthouse

Parent spec: [[Polish-Pass-for-Arthouse-Site]] · [[Maintain-an-Image-Heavy-Portfolio-Site]] Status: Draft — destination unclear, need to evaluate tools

1. The problem

The arthouse client’s body of work includes photography that is racy / NSFW. To showcase that work publicly without exposing the original imagery, we want a pipeline that:

1. Takes a source photograph as input
2. Returns an output that is clearly AI-generated (so no reasonable viewer mistakes it for the original photo)
3. Preserves the composition, mood, and subject pose of the source — these are what the artist wants to be hired for
4. Has a consistent visual style across a shoot (multiple transformed images read as a series, not random outputs)
5. Is fast/cheap enough to iterate at the volume of a portfolio shoot (50–200 images)

The output style should read as illustration, not photo-realism — anime, painterly, ink-and-wash, or graphic novel. Photo-realistic style transfer would defeat the privacy purpose.

2. Why this is its own document

The polish pass on the home page can ship without solving this. But this is a load-bearing capability for the portfolio surface — without it, large swaths of the client’s actual work cannot be shown.

3. Candidate tools

3.1 Ideogram v3 (already wired)

• Already used by [[generate-consistent-og-images]] skill
• IDEOGRAM_API_KEY already in ~/.secrets
• Supports style reference images and character reference (consistency across a series)
• Open question: Does Ideogram do meaningful image-to-image conditioning on a source photo, or only style-reference (where the source guides aesthetic, not composition)? Need to verify against current API docs.

3.2 Replicate

• Many models, pay-per-call, no infra
• Strong candidates:
  • flux-dev / flux-schnell with image conditioning + LoRA for anime style
  • sdxl + ControlNet (pose / canny / depth) — best for composition fidelity
  • Dedicated anime models: animagine-xl, anything-v5, counterfeit-xl
• Trade-off: more control, more knobs, longer iteration loop

3.3 Stability AI direct API

• SD 3 / SDXL with strength-controlled img2img
• Style fidelity good, composition-preservation requires ControlNet
• More setup than Replicate

3.4 Local (ComfyUI / Automatic1111)

• Full control, zero per-call cost after setup
• High overhead for one-off creative pipelines
• Probably overkill for a single-client portfolio

4. The composition-vs-style tradeoff

Two failure modes to design against:

• Too faithful to source: output reads as “a photo with a filter” — the NSFW essence isn’t actually obscured, just stylized. Defeats the privacy purpose.
• Too liberal with source: output reads as “generic anime girl” — loses the specific pose, composition, lighting that makes the client’s work theirs.

The right control point is probably ControlNet pose/depth on a strongly anime-styled base model — keeps the silhouette and composition, replaces the rendering.

5. Series consistency

A portfolio shoot is 20–50 images of the same subject. They need to read as a series. Options:

• Train a small LoRA on the subject (overkill for one-off)
• Use a character reference image across all calls (Ideogram supports this)
• Use the same seed + prompt scaffold across the batch with only pose changing
• Manually curate the most consistent outputs and discard outliers (most pragmatic)

6. Privacy-of-the-pipeline question

If we send the source photos to a third-party API (Ideogram, Replicate, Stability), the source photo leaves the local machine. Depending on the provider’s data-retention policy, this may or may not be acceptable for genuinely sensitive material. Worth checking each provider’s policy before this is more than a prototype.

Local-only inference (option 3.4) is the only way to fully eliminate this risk.

7. Next moves

1. Pick one candidate to prototype against — recommend Ideogram first because it’s already wired and the lift to test is minimal. If style-reference-only is the constraint, fall back to Replicate flux+ControlNet.
2. Test on a single non-sensitive source photo — verify composition preservation and “obviously AI” output before exposing any real NSFW source.
3. Document the data-retention finding for whichever provider we pick.
4. Sketch the directory flow — private/transform-source/<name>.jpg → script call → public/images/ai-rendered/<name>.webp.
5. Decide where the transform script lives — sites/arthouse-site/scripts/? Or a shared utility?

This is the exploration phase. No commitments yet.

8. References

• [[Polish-Pass-for-Arthouse-Site]] — parent
• [[generate-consistent-og-images]] skill — current Ideogram usage
• [[crawl-fetch-ingest]] skill — ~/.secrets API key pattern