10 Best Free Artistic Photo Editor Software For Windows

Here is a list of best free artistic photo editor software for Windows. These photo editors provide a number of artistic effects which let you convert photo to art. These effects include Ink Sketch, Pencil Sketch, Oil Painting, Cartoon, Watercolor painting effect, Posterize, Canvas effect, Sprayed Strokes effect, Smudge Stick effect, etc. You can customize these effects by adjusting related parameters which include ink outline, coloring, brush size, coarseness, pencil tip size, intensity, etc.

As these are feature rich photo editors, you get numerous filters and effects to enhance or manipulate your photos, such as visual effects, deform filters, stylize effect, aged effect, texture effect, etc. You also get various drawing, transformation, adjustment, and layer tools in most of these. Also, all of these support popular image formats to import and export, such as JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIF, etc.

My Favorite Artistic Photo Editor Software For Windows:

GIMP and FotoSketcher both are my favorite artistic photo editors as they provide a good number of artistic effects to add to your photos and convert photo to art.

You may also like some best free Mirror Effect Photo Editor Software, Kaleidoscope Software, and Makeup Photo Editor Software for Windows.

GIMP

GIMP is a free open source artistic photo editor software for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and other operating systems. It provides a good number of artistic effects to convert photo to art. You can also customize various parameters related to different effects, such as intensity, mask radius, etc. Let’s have a look at these artistic effects provided in GIMP:

• Apply Canvas, to texture images as artist’s canvas.
• Cartoon, to add cartoonist effect to your photos.
• Cubism, to give photos a touch of cubist painting style.
• Glass Tile, to simulate distortion caused by rectangular glass tile.
• Oilify, to convert photos to oil painting.
• Photocopy, to simulate color distortion caused by a copy machine.
• Waterpixels, filter based on watershed transformation.
• Clothify, to add cloth-like texture.
• Predator, to add predator effect to photos.
• Weave, to add weave effect to photos.

It provides some more effects in the Artistic category such as Softglow, Van Gogh, etc. Other categories of filters include blur, distort, light and shadow, noise, and many more. It provides a feature rich set of photo editing tools which include transformation, adjustment, layers, paint, etc. You can find many view and select options which ease out the process of editing images. It supports PNG, JPG, BMP, TIFF, SVG, ICO, WMF, etc. formats. It can also be used as a GIF speed changer, GIF frame editor, greeting card maker, etc.

FotoSketcher

FotoSketcher is a dedicated software to create arts from digital photos. You can add a lot of artistic effects to your images. These effects include pencil sketch effects (b&w, color, oil pastel), pen & ink sketch effects, painting effects (watercolor, bilateral filter, oil painting, brushstrokes, etc.), stylize effects (pixelation, cartoon, emergence, linear halftoning, etc.), and some other effects vivify, vintage, etc. For each of these effects, you can customize related parameters. For example, for pencil sketch, you can customize edge threshold, edge intensity, brushstroke intensity, strength of effect, etc.

It is a nice photo editor which provides crop, add text, rotate, invert color, etc. features. You can find a batch processing option too which lets you process images in batch. It displays both source image and edited image on the interface to compare both the images. It supports BMP, JPEG, and PNG image formats.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET is a popular photo editing software for Windows. It provides some artistic effects to add to your digital photos and convert photo to art. These effects are ink sketch, oil painting, and pencil sketch. You can customize various parameters for respective artistic effect to create arts from photos, like ink outline, coloring, brush size, coarseness, pencil tip size, etc. You also get various blur, distort, noise, stylize, etc. effects. to manipulate your photos. It comes with drawing tools, image transformation options, and layer tools to edit images.

It supports BMP, GIF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, etc. formats.

GeniuX Photo EFX

GeniuX Photo EFX is another free artistic photo editor for Windows. After loading a picture, click on its Artistic button. It will open up artistic tools in the right panel. There you can view a list of artistic filters divided into multiple categories, such as ink sketch, pencil stroke, pencil sketch, ink border, watercolor, oil pastel, canvas, etc. You can find a lot more effects to add to your photos. You get PRO Artistic Filters too which include pastel color, marker color, ink, charcoal, pencil, sketch, sketched chalk, color pencil, watercolor, black marker, color marker, pop art, etc. filters. You also get paper filters like canvas, wood, wall, etc. You can apply brush size and opacity to convert photo to art. It also provides tools to retouch photos and color manipulation filters.

It is quite a featured art photo editor which supports BMP, JPG, PNG, TIFF, RAS, WMF, etc. formats.

Pinta

Pinta is a free image editor which lets you add three artistic effects to your photos. These effects are Ink Sketch, Oil Painting, and Pencil Sketch. For Ink Sketch effect, you can customize ink outline and coloring. To create oil painting, you can adjust brush size and coarseness. While to add Pencil Sketch effect, you can customize pencil tip size and color range. Apart from these artistic effects, it provides a lot of other image effects to manipulate images. These include blur effects, distort effects, noise effects, render effects (cloud, Julia fractal, Mandelbrot fractal), glow, red eye removal, sharpen, soften, and stylize effects.

It is quite a feature rich image editor which provide image adjustment tools, drawing tools, layers support, and other essential features required in editing images.

PhotoFiltre

PhotoFiltre is an advanced photo editing software for Windows. It provides a good number of artistic filters which include Pointilize, Oil-based paint, Watercolor, Rough pastels, Ink outline, Colored pencil, Black pencil, Charcoal/ Blood, Sprayed Strokes, Smudge Stick, Comics strip, etc. While adding an artistic effect, you can customize related parameters, like level, threshold, etc. Apart from these, you get various visual effects, deform filters, stylize effect, aged effect, texture effect, etc. It provides layer tools and drawing tools to manipulate photos.

It supports image formats like BMP, GIF, ICO, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc.

Chasys Draw IES

Chasys Draw IES is a feature rich set of image processing tools for Windows. It provides a photo editing application which is Chasys Draw IES Artist. Using this application of this software, you can add Oilify artistic effects to a photo and convert photo to oil painting. You can customize this effect by adjusting brush size. This effect can be accessible from Effects > Stylize menu. Other than that, it provides a lot of other effects to your photos which include Posterize, Emboss, Edge Detect, Pixelate, Diffuse Glow, Swirl, Pinch, Drop Shadow, Blur effects, Shrink Opacity, Dissolve, etc.

Not just as a photo editor, it can also be used for drawing from the scratch, and also for creating animations. It provides a separate Icon Generator to create icons in different sizes. It supports all common image formats like PNG, JPEG, GIF, ICO, WebP, BMP, CUR, etc.

Krita

Krita is a feature rich drawing software which lets you edit photos and create animations too. It provides a set of artistic filters which can be accessed from the Filters menu. These include Halftone, Index Colors, Oilpaint, Pixelize, Posterize, and Raindrops. You can customize various parameters to add these filters, such as brush size, smoothness, etc. Other filters that can be used to enhance photos such as color manipulation, blur effects, emboss, image adjustments, etc.

It is a featured photo editing software. You can read about its full review here > Krita Review.

Cartoon Generator

Cartoon Generator, as the name implies, is a free software to convert photo to cartoon. You can add some basic art effects in it such as sketch, sketch plus dot, pencil sketch, etc. As you open a photo in it, you can adjust sketch border intensity, sketch detail level, darkness, brush width, and dot intensity. You can also enable or disable blur, sharpen, adjust sketch depth, color sketch, and mix similar color options.

It provides a Batch Converter to add effects to multiple images at once. It supports image formats including JPG, BMP, PNG, GIF, and TIF.

NPS Image Editor

NPS Image Editor is a free portable artistic photo editor for Windows. It can add only a single artistic effect i.e. Artsy Colorize effect to your photo. For adding this effect, you can adjust color hue, vibrance, brightness, and distortion values. You can access this effect from Filter menu. Apart from this, you can add a blur effect and an alpha adjustment filter to your photos.

It provides drawing tools, color adjustment options, image format adjustment tools, etc. It supports BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, etc. images.