Photo to Drawing or Painting with Color Filters

Change the colors in camera pictures so they look like drawings or paintings. Grouping pixels together can make the image look like a painting. Reducing the number of colors can make it look like a drawing. Edge detection can make it look like a sketch. Use crayon colors to make it look like it was made using crayons. With a few mouse clicks you can transform a photo into art.

The paint filters change the picture one pixel at a time. A medium size image would be over a million pixels. It could take more than 30 seconds to make a picture you took with a camera look like a painting. Creating the oil and spray painting effects take longer with a larger radius. This program can use a webcam, video or a picture. Play or pause videos using the Video checkbox. Uncheck Take Picture when you want to replace the original with the current image.

In the pictures above I altered the colors using color filters. The program was made for and tested on a laptop. It may not work as well on your phone. If you block the webcam then you will need to refresh the page to allow the program to use your camera. Select Small, Width, Height or Full to change the maximum canvas size. The By# option stands for paint by number. It uses the Edges and color match values. For the Pix option set the radius as the pixelate width and the intensity as the length.

Experiment to see what you can make with this paint program.

☰ Menu

I obtained crayon, marker and pencil RGB codes from Jenny's Crayon Collection and paint ones from Paint Maker. When the Custom color option is selected you can 'Add' colors from the displayed image or from the other color lists. Click the name of the option to add the list or select an area on the image to add a single color. The Custom number is for skipping pixels. Increasing it may reduce the number of colors. Usually color lists should contain less than 300 colors.

Warning, if you use more than 1,000 colors when using color lists then making the picture will take a long time and it will probably look identical to the original.