How to turn a photo into a cartoon or painting

Artistic filters do the work. In Paint by Zaweba, filters such as Cartoon, Oil Paint, Van Gogh, Painter and Cubism turn a photo into an illustration or a painting, and each one shows a live preview while you move its settings, so you can see the result before applying it. All of it runs offline, with no AI service involved.

Turning a photo into art is mostly about removing detail in the right way. A cartoon simplifies colour into flat areas with strong outlines. A painting replaces fine detail with brush marks. The filters do this mathematically, and the choice of photo and settings is what makes the result look good.

Picking a filter

Cartoon flattens colours and adds dark outlines, the comic book look. It suits portraits with clear features and simple backgrounds.

Oil Paint smears the picture into thick strokes, with settings for cleanliness, scale, bristle detail and a lighting angle that gives the paint a sense of depth. Landscapes and still lifes suit it well.

Van Gogh lays down swirling directional strokes. Painter builds the picture from visible strokes. Cubism breaks it into angular facets. These are bolder and work best on simple, strong compositions.

There are also the classic sets of artistic, brush stroke, sketch and texture filters. Sketch filters use your foreground and background colours, so a charcoal sketch can be in sepia on cream rather than black on white, just by changing the two colours first.

Step by step

Duplicate the photo layer first, so the original stays below. Choose a filter from the Filter menu and move its settings while watching the live preview. Apply it when it looks right.

Then judge it at the size it'll be seen. Painterly filters often look better slightly smaller than full size, and outlines from a cartoon filter may need to be bolder for a small social post.

Getting a good result

Start with a good photo: clear light, a simple background and a clear subject. Filters exaggerate clutter, and a busy background becomes a busy painting.

Prepare the photo before filtering. A little more contrast helps the cartoon filter find clean outlines. Reducing noise first stops Oil Paint turning grain into odd little strokes. Blurring the background slightly beforehand keeps attention on the subject.

Combine layers. Run Oil Paint on one copy and a sketch filter on another, then blend the sketch over the paint at low opacity with a blend mode such as Multiply. The outlines sharpen the painted look. Mask a filter away from a face if the effect is too strong there and you want the eyes to stay crisp.

Keeping it editable

If you convert the layer to an embedded object first, from Layer > Embedded Object, any filter you run on it joins an editable stack under the layer. You can reopen the filter to change its settings, hide it, mask it or delete it later. That's the best way to experiment, because nothing is permanent.

Other ways to do it

Quick Looks has one-click Sketch, Oil paint and Poster edges looks with an intensity slider, which are quicker if you just want a taste of the effect. And Paint by Zaweba's brush engine can paint over a photo by hand for a result no filter can match. For most people, though, an artistic filter with a careful choice of photo is the fastest route from snapshot to art.