Make pictures into paintings
Turn Photos into Paintings - 11 Apps (FREE & Paid)
Ever wanted to make a photo look like a painting? Thankfully, here in 2022, there are plenty of great apps that turn photos into paintings with just a few clicks!
This guide reveals 8 of the best apps for iOS (for the iPhone and iPad) and Android smartphones that’ll apply painting styles to your favourite photos.
We’ve also included a couple of great products for Mac and Windows computer users too.
Ready to transform your photos into pieces of artwork with the latest watercolour or oil painting effect?
Let’s dive right in!
Table of Contents
Best Phone Apps to Turn Photos into Paintings in 2022
If you’ve ever wondered how to turn a painting into a picture for free, there are actually several great iPhone and Android apps that can help.
Some of the apps require a small payment to download, while others are free but require payment for additional features.
(You may also be interested to learn about other apps that can turn your photos into sketches and drawings too. )
Let’s have a look at the best options.
1. Colorcinch (Web)Channel your inner Picasso with Colorcinch and turn your photos into incredibly realistic paintings and sketches in just one click!
This best in class tool comes with hundreds of AI-powered photo effects, filters and overlays to add some creative intrigue to otherwise dull portrait and landscape photos.
Furthermore, you can really fine-tune their painting effects by adjusting intensity, color, and other details to achieve truly unique artwork.
Colorcinch also comes with a variety of hand-crafted frames, masks and overlays that you can play around with to further personalize your photos.
- Apps to hide photos
Brushstroke is an iPhone app that’s ideal for turning your photos into unique works of art. Brushstroke is quick and easy to select an image, and the app will automatically start the transformation.
In addition to this, Brushstroke has a vast selection of filters and creative applications that you apply to your photos. This way, you’ll achieve a truly unique look every single time.
Filters for colour, canvas and effects are all represented via icons you swipe to browse and tap to add.
For an authentic artistic experience, Brushstroke presents a blank section for you to use the touchscreen and sign your name below your painting when completing the photo-to-art process.
With your creation complete, you’re free to share your painting directly on social media. Brushstroke is one of the best products on the app store for iOS.
3. Glaze (iOS)The Glaze iOS app has been hanging around the App Store for several years now, but it’s still an impressive photo-to-painting app on iPhone.
Glaze provides users with a comprehensive set of image editing tools to apply painting styles to photos and fine-tune the outcomes.
Its best feature is that you can make your custom styles by blending existing Glaze styles in the Workshop mode.
Then all you need to do is apply the painting style to your photo and others on your camera roll.
And for a truly artistic experience, you can edit your portrait photos in portrait orientation and your landscape shots in landscape orientation.
The user interface and menu of Glaze is very intuitive and provides simple navigation from start to finish. At the end of the day, it’s a simple tool for exploring how to make a photo look like a painting.
4. Waterlogue (iOS)There are many different mediums to create art – pencil, charcoal, pastels, acrylics and oils. But by far, one of the most mesmerising is the use of watercolours to bring art to life.
Fortunately, Waterlogue for iPhone is an app that does a tremendous job of transforming your photos into watercolour works of art.
The Waterlogue app is comprehensive in its offering of various tools. There are several watercolour painting styles presets that allows you to get the base look of your photos.
Further to this, you can fine-tune the level of detail, size of the file, brightness and finally, how the finished border appears.
The Waterlogue app is super easy to navigate, and the user interface is simple with big icons making it obvious what your next step in the process is.
It’s probably my favourite app out of the lot and I enjoyed using it to convert some of my travel images into paintings such as the one above. I especially like how you can see the clouds blend into the blue sky above the building.
5. Portrait Painter (iOS)Portrait Painter is an iPhone app that performs a bang-up-job of turning your portrait shots into gorgeous paintings.
It’s available on all major mobile and desktop platforms and is hugely popular to simulate painted portraits.
The user interface is straightforward and includes an ellipse tool to mask areas. With the ellipse, you control the brushstrokes’ detail within the designated space.
Brushstrokes rendering is very realistic and results in lifelike paintings in oils and acrylics.
Finally, choose the paint surface so that the finished product replicates canvas types.
Once you’re satisfied with the painting style created you can share your images directly to social media for the world to enjoy.
6. Tangled FX (iOS)Tangled FX is an iPhone app that transforms even your least liked photos into unique paint-like canvases.
The app uses a straightforward user interface to offer 16 presets to turn your photos into painted scenes. Tangled FX has a large range of effects. I particularly like the fibre effects that use the existing lines within the photo to created fibrous textures across the scene. Here is an example of the app in action that only took a few seconds to complete
While that look may not be for everyone, it’s undoubtedly unique, and many will find at least a handful of images within their smartphone gallery worthy of this transformation.
Tangled FX boasts the ability to render photos within the original native HD format. Also, the app upscales smaller pictures before the transformation process to allow for greater detail – something that not even the native iPhone camera app can do.
As with many of these apps, Tangled FX provides flexibility to share your finished works with online content and their community.
7. Prisma (Android & iOS)Prisma is a remarkable app that’s available on Android and iOS – it even won an App Store ‘App Of The Year Award’ a few years back.
It’s no wonder, given that Prisma has over 300 painting and art-style filters available to transform your photos in countless ways. There’s so much choice here that you could spend a whole lunch break editing and converting a single photo to a painted masterpiece.
Having said that, once you get the hang of Prisma and find your favourite presets, you’ll likely stick to styles that you prefer the look of.
But the choices don’t stop there as Prisma releases a new filter every day.
A feature that Prisma offers over other apps is the ability to transform your photos into paintings that adopt the style of histories most noted artists. Add a style like a touch of Dali or even Picasso to your selfie to update your profile pic with style.
The navigation of the app is straightforward thanks to s sensible menu system. It’s a powerful iPhone tool that creates a work of art with the click of a screen.
8. PicsArt (Android & iOS)PicsArt is one of the iPhone and Android apps that provides a comprehensive toolkit for editing photos on the go.
PicsArt is incredibly popular, with staggering numbers of downloads to date. Plus, on top of its filters, text options, collage builder and sticker maker, it also features the ability to turn the pictures from your camera roll into paintings.
With PicsArt, you can take a standard selfie and use any of the Canvas effect tools to add hand-painted and drawn finishes around and over the top of your photo.
You can even add a background to photos.
While it’s a very comprehensive and capable app, there are many options to scroll through to get to the effects you want. It’s often the case with apps that do it all – not a huge negative, but if you wish to turn a photo into a painting, there are more straightforward options.
9. Adobe Paint Can (iOS)
Adobe is a household name for the comprehensive desktop and mobile image editing tools they develop for photographers and visual creators out there.
Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop will instantly sound familiar if you have had anything to do with photography. It turns out, Adobe also creates amazing apps for photo editing on the go.
Adobe Paint Can, the iPhone app, is no exception as it offers a very well thought out and executed mobile app. Paint Can provides you with the option to use existing presets or go manual and fine-tune the brushes’ size and the various styles you can add to your picture.
The best part of the Adobe Paint Can app is that you can spend as long or as little as you like converting your photo to a painting..
Also, you can choose to only convert a portion of your image to the painted render while retaining the details from your photo in other areas.
While it’s only available on iOS, the iPad crowd will love using it on a bigger screen or with an Apple Pen.
Free Desktop Software to Turn Photos into Paintings
If you’re wondering how to turn a photo into a painting online by using your computer, there are a number of free sites that allow you to add realistic painting styles to anything you upload.
In addition, most of the popular photo editing software tools include some kind of portrait painting filter that gives that photo-to-painting effect you’re looking for.
Here are the two recommended options.
Adobe Online Photo To Painting ConvertorAdobe develops software to manage and edit photos and graphic elements.
They’re the industry leader who offers renowned software tools such as Photoshop and Lightroom. Adobe provides several free editing tools, including the Online Photo To Painting Converter – part of the Adobe Photoshop Express platform.
If you have any of the Lightroom or Photoshop versions, you can also convert your photos to paintings with the use of the software – but that’s a whole other guide.
The free converter is a simple application. Upload a JPEG or PNG file to the online site and then click the Art Effects tool kit. Then you select from Oil Painting, Cartoon, Colourize, Pop Art, or Stylize. There’s also a list of effects with each showing a preview of your image with the effect applied.
You adjust the intensity of the effect as some of them are strong to begin with. All that’s left is to download your finished painting.
While it’s a free-to-use service, you need to create an Adobe account to access its features – so not entirely no strings attached.
Tuxpi Photo EditorTuxpi is a free online photo editor offering a range of photo editing tools, including adding frames to your existing images.
If you want to use a computer to edit your photos, add text and apply a range of filters, it doesn’t get simpler than this.
Upload your picture and apply any of the 60 photo editing tools. Tuxpi allows you to add multiple effects on top of one another. For example, fade your photo’s edges, then apply the photo to paint process and frame it up. Plus, a preview of each change loads within seconds.
Download and share on your social channels to show your friends just how clever you are.
While Tuxpi is fun, there’s no fine-tuning of the effects’ strength, brush sizes or mask. Here’s a before and after shot with the help of Tuxpi – I’m really happy with the outcome.
- How do I put text on a picture on my iPhone?
Final Words
There’s a bunch of free and paid apps available for either iPhone and Android mobile platforms – many of which can be downloaded to tablets.
Converting your photos to paintings with just a few screen taps may seem a little like cheating to some.
But in reality, it’s just another form of digital media that provides creatives with the tools they need to create amazing and interesting works of art.
Download an app and play around with transforming their favourite images into artistic paintings.
What do you think of apps like these? Have you tried making a picture look like a painting for do you have other apps you would recommend? What are the results of your attempts with painting tool apps? Join the conversation below.
Instant Photo to Painting Converter Online by Real Artists
Instant Photo to Painting Converter Online by Real Artists | InstapaintingHand made by independent artists
Upload your photo and instantly make your favorite photo look like a popular style of artwork. Get a professional artist to turn it into a real physically hand-made piece of art shipped to you for as little as $49!
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Turn your picture into a real painting
Get matched with an independent artist to make a canvas painting
Our paint effect is generated by our AI painter, which uses state of the art deep neural network powered convolutional NN models.
If you like the preview, we can get a portrait painter to paint it for real and ship it to your doorstep for as little as $49 and in as little as 2 weeks.
Surprise someone with the gift of a real, textured, physical work of art instead of merely a digital painting.
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Photo to Painting Techniques Compared
Method 1Image Convolutions
This is the most basic technique and building block for all other techniques for turning a photo into a painting style.
The technology usually applies a basic computational convolutional effect, where a small grid of pixels, called a kernel, modifies the underlying pixel values in a static way that is defined by the programmer. A common convolution is the gaussian blur, which applies a blur effect. A small grid of pixels modifies the RGB pixel values to achieve a blur, and this is applied across the whole image.
Method 2Adobe Photoshop Filters
Most image filters apply a series of image convolution algorithms with manually hand-tuned parameters. Because they are hand-tuned, they result in the basic and fixed effect on most images.
Method 3Convolutional Neural Networks
This is a much newer technique that is data driven. A neural network model is trained on images in general so that features can be extracted from the underlying image. Features are encoded grouping of pixels that match an abstract concept of some object that has been learned from the statistical model. For example, with enough training data, a model of images could identify the concept of a person, hand, or stop sign, from pixel values in an image because it can learn the invariant characteristics of those objects (the "big picture" so to speak).
Features are extracted from the photo you upload as well as the style image that is being targeted. The convolutional network essentially applies a series of image convolution filters, much like Photoshop filters, and tunes the parameters of each filter automatically to automatically try to match the features extracted from the style image.
Method 4Human Artists
This is arguably the most advanced technique. A master artist can interpret what makes up a certain style used in a painting style and apply the same style to another photo reference. The downsides is that it does cost some money to do and they are a bit slower.
The Instapainting Method
At Instapainting, we combine Convolutional Neural Networks and human artists to give the best experience. You can preview your artwork in select styles instantly using our AI Painter, and then get a master human artist to interpret and make it real and physical, and clean up the shortcomings of the AI Painter.
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Convert photos to paintings - Online and Free
one
Step 1
Choose an art photo editor from the list
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Step 2
Upload your photo or image from PC, cloud or URL
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Step 3
Select an art filter and apply to your image
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Step 4
Download the result to your computer
About Photo Art Creator
Now it is difficult to imagine what our life was like before the advent of neural networks that can turn any simple photo into a real work of art.
Many of you probably remember the look and feel of the Prisma app and how your friends posted hundreds of images it edited on Instagram. We have seen photographs in the style of Salvador Dali and Van Gogh, Picasso and da Vinci. Since then, many other similar applications have appeared, and most importantly, it has become available not only from the phone, but also on the computer. Here you can turn your paintings into paintings in seconds and absolutely free. Choose from thousands of art styles, experiment, share your results on social networks. It is not necessary to be an artist to make a photo look like a painting by famous masters.
View all tools
Photo editor
The best free online photo editors in one place - is it possible? Yes. All image editing tools at your fingertips. Crop and resize photos, flip and rotate images, adjust brightness and contrast, apply Instagram effects and filters to images. Adding frames, textures, stickers, and writing text on photos has never been easier.
And all this right in your browser without installing any applications.
Photo Editing
Collage Maker
Create collages from your photos easily and for free, and we will make sure you have the best tools for it. In the online collage editors we have collected, there is a huge selection of different settings, border thickness adjustment, many ready-made collage templates, and the ability to download in various formats. Combine your photos into collages, no matter how many images you have - 5, 10 or 50. Manage color, change background, add different textures and frames to make your collages even more gorgeous.
Make a collage
Art photo
Turn your photo into art. Thanks to the use of modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and neural networks, creators and photographers can now turn their photos into art objects at the touch of a button.
Just upload your image and get paintings in the style of famous artists like Picasso, Van Gogh or Da Vinci. No need to learn how to draw, our art photo tools will do everything for you, and your drawings will turn into world-class masterpieces.
Make a painting from a photo
Minecraft skin editor
Minecraft players are offered various Minecraft skins that will make the game more interesting. A large base of skins for Minecraft by nickname, easy search by color, sorting by rating, format and model, downloading and installing skins that will allow you to completely transform your character in Minecraft. And also find skins for girls, HD skins and raincoats for them. This is probably the most complete collection of 64x32 minecraft skins on the web. Any player can choose the appearance to their liking.
Editor's Choice
Make a GIF
Create GIFs online with our simple tools.
We have collected a huge number of different GIF creators like Giphy and others. Here you can convert video to GIF format or create GIF from a set of photos and images. Many settings are available, such as frame switching time, animation sequence, source editing. Surprise your audience with high quality homemade GIFs. Animated pictures have become one of the most popular types of content on the Internet.
Make GIF
Meme Generator
Create memes Online and Free. Choose from a complete library of the most popular memes found on the web. Whether you are a professional social media manager or want to make a joke for a friend, the meme generator will help you. If you want to share your sense of humor but don't know how to make a meme, just find your favorite meme template, add text, edit and you're done. Creating memes has never been so easy.
Create memes
Video editor
Edit videos in a modern way.
Why install heavy software on your computer for simple video editing tasks. Currently, the most common video editing tools are available Online and Free. No more installations, do everything right in the browser. The online video editor allows you to cut, trim and merge your videos, add sounds and music, add logos, watermarks and even subtitles, change the resolution and speed. You won't believe how easy it is.
Edit video
Webcam recording
Record video from your webcam without limits. Our collection of free online webcam recorders will satisfy all your needs. You can take photos, record videos, take selfies - all right in your browser without any apps or programs. Easily apply a huge variety of filters and effects to your recordings, change your voice, background or even your appearance. Replace yourself with other characters and heroes.
Webcam recording
Image converter
Convert images between different formats.
Easiest conversion with these free online converters. You can convert images from and to: PNG, JPG, GIF, PDF, WebP, HEIC, SVG and other extensions. You can not only bulk convert images, but also reduce their size, quality, resolution and compression ratio. Converting raster and vector graphics.
Convert images
Logo generator
Make a logo online with an automatic generator. Are you creating a startup and want to create a logo for your new company? Don't pay designers and create your logo for free. All you have to do is answer a few simple questions about how you see your future logo design, add your product information, and the online software will generate many variations of your new logo. You just have to choose the one you like best.
Make a logo
Flower tools
Choose the right colors and trendy color schemes with ease.
Using the tools available on our website, you can create the perfect palette for your website, design layout, and more. Choose or create color schemes with two, three or more matching colors. Get color from images. Play with the color wheel. Now all your colors will match.
Flower management
Photostock
Choose from millions of available images. We have collected the most popular photo stocks for you so that you do not have to search for a long time. Now many images, icons, backgrounds, elements and other graphics are available to you in one place. You no longer need to worry about licenses and rights - all photo stocks offer a huge selection of free photos and templates available for download.
Find stock photos
Turning a photo into an oil painting with AKVIS OilPaint
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Buy Trial version
AKVIS OilPaint is a program for simulating oil painting.
OilPaint allows you to create an oil painting from a photo. A feature of the program is a unique algorithm for applying strokes, which most reliably reproduces the technique of working with a brush.
Painting with oil paints is a complex and lengthy process. With AKVIS OilPaint you can become an artist and turn photos into paintings in just a few minutes!
Oil painting is one of the most popular techniques: its history dates back several centuries. Most often, oil paints are written on linen or cotton canvas. Oil painting is distinguished by the brightness of colors, the plasticity of strokes, the depth and colorfulness of color transitions, as well as the naturalness and naturalness of the pictorial image.
The oil painting technique is used to create works in a variety of styles (impressionism, abstractionism, photorealism, etc.
), in the genres of still life, landscape, portrait, historical and everyday painting.
Oil painting techniques are varied. AKVIS OilPaint allows you to simulate a variety of oil painting techniques. By choosing the density, texture and thickness of strokes, you can not only achieve impressive effects, but also invent your own style of drawing.
OilPaint transforms a photo into an oil painting before your eyes. The program creates a work of art in the technique of oil painting.
The program allows you to customize the settings for creating and overlaying brush strokes and change the overall look and style of the picture. You can enhance the handmade effect by adding artistic strokes to the edges of the pattern in the Edge tab.
Options of the Abstraction tab allow you to turn any image into a unique abstract painting full of bright colors and whimsical shapes. Get creative with AKVIS OilPaint !
Select the surface of the canvas ( Appearance -> Canvas ) for more realism.
Add text, logo or watermark ( Design -> Lettering ). Frame your digital painting masterpiece in a luxurious frame ( Decoration -> Frame ).
AKVIS OilPaint offers a range of ready-to-use presets. Batch processing allows you to automatically create many images in the style of oil painting.
Additional tools for manual refinement of the result obtained allow you to apply the finishing touches to the finished picture, enhance or reduce the effect on selected areas.
AKVIS OilPaint can be used as a standalone program ( standalone ) and as a plug-in ( plugin ) for graphic editors AliveColors, Adobe Photoshop, Corel PaintShop Pro and others. More details - compatibility table.
The program features depend on the license type. Some options and tools are only available for Home Deluxe and Business licenses. During the trial period, you can try all the options and choose the most suitable one.
