10 Best Apps to Turn Photos Into Paintings of 2026

Prisma is the app most people mean when they ask for a photo to painting app, and it earns the top spot on breadth and polish. Its US App Store listing describes a library of more than 500 styles with new ones going live daily, plus portrait styles built for selfies. The most useful tool is Portrait Segmentation, which applies a painting style to the person or to the background separately, so a face can stay sharp while the scene turns to oil paint. You can also replace a selfie background and add frames. Apple's editors note that the AI re-creates photos as images that look hand-painted. The free version lets you try styles; Premium opens every style and saves photos in HD, with a 3-day free trial first. Premium Monthly is $7.99 on the US App Store, and a weekly plan costs $1.99. Prisma says it has over 120 million users and supports four languages.

BeCasso from Digital Masterpieces is the strongest choice when the painting is headed for a wall. Its App Store listing says it exports artwork up to 64 megapixels, enough for canvas prints and posters, and it connects directly to CanvasPop for canvas prints and MyPostcard for postcards. The style library covers watercolor, oil painting, pencil drawing, cartoon and pop art, with hundreds of hand-curated filters you can adjust and save as custom styles. Retouch tools work with a finger or Apple Pencil, and projects save your progress so you can come back to an edit. Everything runs on the device, which the vendor says means no uploads and no internet requirement. The catch is cost and size: full resolution, adjustable effects and retouch tools need a subscription, Pro Suite costs $7.99 a month or $149.99 lifetime, and the download is up to 846.9 MB. It holds a 4.8 rating from 8.2K US ratings.

Brushstroke from Code Organa does one job and keeps it simple: pick a photo from your albums or take a new one, and it renders a painting in one touch. From there you can try different color palettes, adjust the painting, choose a canvas or surface, and sign it before sharing. Its standout extra is Video Paintings, which the App Store listing says turns videos into moving paintings at up to 4K resolution, something none of the other painting apps here document. Like BeCasso, it partners with CanvasPop, so you can order a framed canvas print from inside the app. Brushstroke holds a 4.8 rating from 14K US ratings and is rated 4+. The downsides are transparency: the listing does not say how many styles are included, and the price list shows several unlabeled Brushstroke options from $4.99 to $79.99. The cheapest purchase is the $3.99 Illustration Pack.

Painnt from Moonlighting has the largest documented library on this list, with more than 2,000 filters that run from classical art in the style of Van Gogh or Picasso to cartoon sketches. Its standout option is custom styles: you can turn any image, painting or photograph into your own filter and share it with other members of the community. The listing is upfront about the free tier: it limits output resolution and adds a watermark. Premium adds the full library, HD processing, custom styles and watermark removal, and it is the cheapest upgrade here, at $0.99 a week, $1.99 a month or $9.99 a year on the US App Store. That makes Painnt the best value if you are happy to pay a little. The weaker point is reception, with a 4.3 rating from 691 US ratings, lower than the leaders. The app is rated 4+ and supports 24 languages.

Paintation is built for people who care about which art movement their photo ends up in. Its App Store listing describes 500+ styles grouped by era, from Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo through Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Cubism and Surrealism, plus charcoal, pencil and ink textures. Every style has an info button linked to WikiArt, so you can read about the work that inspired it. The app runs entirely offline with on-device models, which means your photos never leave the phone. The workflow has four stages: prepare the photo with retouching tools such as the Vanish object remover, Liquify and Clone Stamp, stylize it, add color filters, then fine-tune saturation, hue and vignette. You can also upload any image as a custom style. That depth makes it slower than one-tap apps. Premium costs $4.99 a month, $17.99 a year or $44.99 for lifetime access, and the app rates 4.8 from 490 US ratings.

BeFunky is a general photo editor rather than a dedicated painting app, but its Artsy effects are the feature the vendor calls the most unique part of the editor. The App Store listing says they turn photos into paintings, cartoons and sketches with one tap, using realistic textures and natural-looking brush strokes. Around them sits a full editor: one-tap enhancement, background removal, object erasing, Portrait Relight, deblur and denoise, a Collage Wizard and thousands of design templates. BeFunky says there are no ads and no registration needed, and projects are available across its mobile and desktop apps after you log in. That makes it a good pick if you want to paint a photo and then put it into a card or collage in the same place. The weak spots are the unpublished effect count and the price: BeFunky Plus costs $14.99 a month or $83.90 a year on the US App Store.

Picsart is the most popular app on this list by ratings, with a 4.7 score from 1.2 million US App Store ratings and an Editors' Choice badge, but it is a broad creative suite rather than a painting specialist. Its listing describes stylized AI filters and AI effects, an AI image generator that turns text into AI art, and Picsart Aura, a chat assistant that creates and edits images in conversation. Around those sit a background remover, object remover, video editor, collage maker and more than 60 million stickers. For turning a photo into a painting, that means you can apply an AI effect and then keep editing, add text or build a post without switching apps. The trade-off is focus: Picsart does not publish a count of painting styles, and its menus are busier than one-purpose apps. Picsart Plus costs $11.99 a month on the US App Store and Pro costs $13.99 a month.

Deep Art Effects focuses on fine-art style transfer. Its App Store listing offers more than 40 styles inspired by Van Gogh, Monet, Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, Rembrandt, Dali and others, with adjustable intensity and near real-time processing. The free basic version saves artworks at 1080px; Premium raises that to 1920px, removes watermarks and adds new exclusive styles every week. A 3840px Ultra HD print version can be bought per image for $1.99, and you can upload your own images to create custom styles. The vendor highlights privacy: data transfer is encrypted, servers are in Europe, and photos are not stored on its servers for guests. Premium is inexpensive at $2.99 a month or $34.99 a year. The limits are a smaller library than Prisma or Painnt, a watermark on free output, and a modest 4.5 rating from 541 US ratings. At 36.3 MB it is the lightest download here.

GoArt is Fotor's AI art app, and it covers both halves of the AI art trend. For photos, its Big Painter filters repaint an image in the style of Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso and other masters, and further artistic filters cover impressionism, ukiyo-e, sketch and anime. The strength of each effect can be adjusted after one tap. For ideas without a photo, the text-to-image generator offers styles such as oil painting, surrealism and concept art. A photo cartoonizer handles selfies, pets and landscapes, and an AI cutout tool swaps backgrounds. Exports reach 8 megapixels, which the listing says is enough to print on T-shirts or wallpaper. On the downside, GoArt is iPhone only, rated 16+, and its pricing mixes Pro plans with coin and credit packs. GoArt Pro costs $12.99 a month or $6.99 a week on the US App Store, and the app rates 4.5 from 3.3K ratings.

Watercolor Effect from Whistle Studios is the simplest app here. Its App Store listing promises that one tap adds a watercolor look to a photo, with additional styles for oil painting, digital, modern and contemporary art, plus more than 15 cartoon filters. You can add text, stickers and other photo effects before sharing to social media or saving to a private in-app gallery, and a short tutorial walks first-time users through it. It needs only iOS 12.0 or later and a 90.2 MB download, so it runs on older iPhones that other apps here no longer support. It rates 4.6 from 9K US ratings. The value is weaker: after a 3-day trial the subscription costs $3.99 a week or $29.99 a year, and the listing does not publish how many painting styles are included. The in-app list also shows one-off purchases for filters and the watermark at $1.99 each.