What is Photo to Oil Painting?

Photo to Oil Painting turns your photos into oil painting-style images using a Kuwahara filter. It smooths flat color areas while keeping edges sharp, giving you the brushstroke texture and warm tones of traditional oil paintings.

The Kuwahara filter divides each pixel's neighbourhood into four quadrants, picks the one with the lowest colour variance, and uses its average. That's why flat regions like skies become buttery-smooth while edges around trees, buildings, or faces stay crisp. Increasing the brush size widens the kernel and produces larger, more painterly strokes.

How to use

1. Upload a photo — landscapes, portraits, and still lifes work especially well.
2. Adjust the brush size to control stroke thickness and the detail level for fine vs. broad strokes.
3. Watch the painting update live as you tune the sliders, drag the divider to compare before and after, then download as PNG or JPEG.

When to use

• Turning a holiday landscape into a canvas print that looks hand-painted.
• Stylising a portrait for a book cover, album art, or wedding invitation.
• Making stock photos blend into an illustrated brand without licensing artwork.

Result

You have a sunset landscape photo from your trip. Upload it, set brush size to medium, and the Kuwahara filter transforms it into an impressionist oil painting with smooth sky gradients and defined tree silhouettes — perfect for a canvas print.

FAQ

What's the difference between this and a Photoshop oil filter?

Most consumer filters smudge the whole image equally. The Kuwahara filter is edge-preserving, so it flattens broad colour regions into strokes but keeps the outlines of faces, branches, and buildings sharp. The output looks closer to real impasto.

Why does my image look soft instead of painted?

Lower the detail level and raise the effect strength. Detail level controls how much fine texture survives; effect strength controls how many filter passes run. Two or three passes at a brush size around 7 usually gives a clear painted look.

Does brush size affect processing time?

Yes. Each step up roughly doubles the kernel area, so a brush size of 9 takes about four times longer than 5. Large images are downscaled to 1200px on the long edge before filtering to keep processing under a few seconds.

Which photos work best?

Photos with strong, simple compositions: landscapes with a clear horizon, portraits with even lighting, or still lifes against a plain background. Busy crowd shots tend to lose detail because too many edges compete inside one brush stroke.

Can I print the result at A3 or larger?

Yes, the export keeps the processed resolution (up to 1200px on the long edge) which prints sharp at A4. For A3 or larger canvas, upscale the PNG with a separate tool before sending to print.

Related Tools