Turning photos into paintings and sketches in Paint by Zaweba

Turning a photo into something that looks painted or drawn is one of the most popular things people do with an image editor. Paint by Zaweba carries the classic sets of artistic, brush stroke, sketch and texture filters, one of each familiar filter, and adds a handful of richer effects on top, most notably Oil Paint.

You can try all of the classic sets through Filter > Filter Gallery, which shows thumbnails and lets you stack several filters in one go.

The classic sets

The Artistic set imitates painting and drawing media, the kind of looks people know from paint, pencil and poster work. Brush Strokes imitates the marks a brush or pen makes on paper, from hatching to inked outlines. Sketch turns a photo into a drawing in two colours, and it uses your foreground and background colours for them. Set a dark brown and a cream before you start and the result looks like a sepia drawing; set black and white for charcoal or graphic pen. Texture puts the picture onto a surface, so it reads as printed on a material rather than shown on a screen.

Oil Paint

Oil Paint is the most convincing painterly filter in the app. It has settings for cleanliness, scale, bristle detail and lighting angle. Cleanliness controls how smooth the strokes are; a lower value gives busier, more textured brushwork. Scale sets the size of the strokes, so a small portrait wants a small scale and a big landscape a larger one. Bristle detail adds the fine grooves a real brush leaves. The lighting angle sets which way the light catches the raised paint, which gives the surface its sense of thickness.

The extras

Cartoon simplifies colours and adds dark outlines for a comic look. Cubism breaks the picture into angular blocks of colour. Van Gogh lays down swirling strokes in the spirit of the painter, and Painter offers a different brush-based look. Hot Wax and Enamel give glossy, poured surfaces. Topography creates contour lines like a map, Sculpture makes the picture look carved, and Aged Newspaper ages it into an old printed page.

There is also a set of material textures: Fur, Straw-wall, Polished Stone, Rough Leather, Weave and Blinds. They are useful for backgrounds, for textures in mock-ups and for laying over a photo in a blend mode.

Getting a convincing result

Start with a good photo. Painterly filters simplify detail, so a picture with a clear subject, strong light and a simple background turns into a better painting than a cluttered snapshot.

Choose the size first. Filters behave differently at different resolutions; a setting that looks like fine brushwork on a small image looks like a smear on a big one. Resize to the final size, then filter.

Stack and blend. A single filter often looks obviously digital. A gentle Oil Paint followed by a Texture filter, or a Sketch layer in Multiply over a softened colour layer, gives a more handmade feel. The Filter Gallery stack makes this easy to try, and duplicate layers with blend modes give even more control.

Add your own touches. A few strokes with the real brushes, a signature, or some hand-painted highlights over a filtered base go a long way towards making a picture feel made rather than processed.

Mistakes to avoid with painterly filters

Applying effects to faces at full strength can make them look odd; mask the face and use a gentler setting there. Forgetting that Sketch filters use the current colours is another; if a sketch comes out in strange colours, check the foreground and background swatches. And with heavy textures, check the result on the device or print size it is intended for.

These filters suit cards, posters, gifts and social posts, and they all share the live preview and Strength control of every filter in Paint by Zaweba.