Image Style Shift

It's difficult to make art, and while what qualifies as art and what doesn't will always be a fickle topic, everyone can appreciate a good painting. Transforming your photos into paintings has always sounded enticing, and software to help you do that exists, even though you have to look closely to find a decent option.

Image Style Shift is a solution that seeks to deliver a more polished experience, allowing its users to transform a regular shot into a painting, based on one of the many freely available templates.

This is a Microsoft Store app, which means that installation takes very little effort from the user. Navigate to its store page, then click Install, and Open. The program will then boot up, and you'll notice that the interface is easy to navigate through.

Insert your images — you can work on them individually, but adding in batches is also possible — and look for a style that best fits your creative vision. You can then play around with the Intensity and Style size sliders, which are the main factors to consider when you want your work to be more or less like the loaded style.

What's more, users can also add a custom style. This can be any image you prefer: the program will try to emulate the target image and blend it with the one from the custom style.

A neat feature available here is the ability to colorize black and white images. Select a monochrome shot, then engage the Colorize function. After a short while, the chosen shot will then be colorized: it's no easy task, but the colors seemed pretty accurate and not at all out of place.

Users can also batch edit their chosen photos to a certain style. Select the photos and the style, and the app will handle the work. It is worth noting, however, that a watermark is applied on output: this may get in the way for some, especially as it is quite intrusive.

Image Style Shift is an interesting piece of software. It can add some design flourishes to your work, which can make all the difference.