CameraView AI Photo Stylizer

AiPhotoStylizer redraws a captured still through an image-generation model. It is the flow the photo-toy apps on the store ship: you press the shutter, and what comes back is your photo drawn as a comic.

It is deliberately a capture effect, not a live one. A round-trip to a hosted model is seconds of latency and a per-image cost, so it belongs on the shutter and never on a frame loop. For a live comic viewfinder, add the procedural CameraEffects.Comic alongside it — that one is offline, free, and runs on the preview. The two compose: the user previews a comic look and gets a generated one when they capture.

Install

• 
• 

# MAUI
dotnet add package Shiny.Maui.Controls.Camera.Ai
# Blazor
dotnet add package Shiny.Blazor.Controls.Camera.Ai

You register an IImageGenerator yourself — that is what keeps the package provider-agnostic. It must support image-to-image editing; note that plenty of chat-capable providers do not offer image generation at all.

MEAI001

IImageGenerator is still marked evaluation-only by Microsoft.Extensions.AI, so constructing one raises MEAI001 in your project. Add <NoWarn>$(NoWarn);MEAI001</NoWarn> until that API ships stable.

MAUI

camera.Effects.Add(CameraEffects.Comic);            // free live viewfinder
camera.Effects.Add(new AiPhotoStylizer(generator)   // generated image on the shutter
{
    Prompt = "Redraw this photo as a comic-book illustration: bold black ink outlines, " +
             "flat cel shading, halftone shadows and punchy saturated colour. Keep the subject, " +
             "composition and pose exactly as they are — restyle the image, do not reimagine the scene.",
    Timeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60)
});

// returns the stylized image — show a busy state, this takes seconds
var photo = await camera.CapturePhotoAsync();

CapturePhotoAsync applies the chain in three stages: pixel effects are baked in by the platform capture path, draw effects are composited on top, and capture effects run last.

Blazor

The browser component has no async post-capture stage, so call the stylizer yourself:

var jpeg = await camera.CapturePhotoAsync();
var comic = await stylizer.StylizeAsync(jpeg);

Prompting

The default asks for inked comic art. The prompt is the whole knob — watercolour, oil painting, pixel art, line drawing and the rest are a string away. The one instruction worth keeping is the last clause: telling the model to restyle rather than reimagine is what stops it inventing a different scene.

Failure never costs the capture

A model outage, a timeout, an auth failure or a provider that replies with a URL instead of inline bytes all raise Error and return the original photo untouched. Treat the event as “the style didn’t apply”, not “the photo was lost” — and surface it to the user that way.

Cancelling the CancellationToken you passed to CapturePhotoAsync cancels the capture properly and propagates; the internal Timeout does not, it just gives up and hands the plain photo back.

Testing offline

The sample app registers a stand-in IImageGenerator that redraws the photo with an obvious treatment instead of calling a model, so the whole round trip — shutter → bytes out → bytes back → that’s what CapturePhotoAsync returns — is demonstrable without an API key or a bill. Doing the same in your own tests is a good way to exercise the flow cheaply.