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How to turn your photos into paintings, cartoons, and pixel art with Adobe Firefly
We all love taking photos, right? That’s surely a smartphone’s most used features, and why it has improved so much over such a short span of time.
But what’s also fun is applying effects to your shots. Like turning a photo into a painting, a cartoon or pixel art for instance.
Adobe offers a few ways to do this - chiefly through Photoshop, Firefly, and Express.
I'll show you three ways to attempt this, either by yourself, or with the use of Adobe’s AI tools and explore how to create pixel-perfect paintings, cartoons, and pixel art drawings from my photos.
How to create artistic effects with Adobe Photoshop
Obviously the first port of call is your own creativity… So how do we turn a photo into a painting, a cartoon or pixel art? With the help of a bunch of filters, of course!
Which is where Photoshop comes in. Let’s start with some paint effects. Accessing one of the filters we need is a simple matter of going to Filter > Filter Gallery. This opens up a whole new window where the ‘Artistic’ folder resides. Choose ‘Dry Brush’, play with the three available sliders, and you’ve got yourself a quick way of turning a photo into a painting.
Another option would be to choose Filter > Stylize > Oil Paint. The interface is different, but the concept is the same: tweak the sliders until you’re happy with the results, click on OK, and the filter is then applied to your entire photo.
Photoshop doesn’t have a ‘cartoon’ filter, so you have to play around with various parameters on your own. For instance, start by duplicating your background layer, then applying the Filter > Stylize > Find Edges to the bottom one, followed by altering the top layer’s blending mode. Scroll through the various options until you find one that works best for you. Increasing the Saturation could also be of benefit here.
And finally, there’s Pixel Art. That’s a pretty simple one: go to Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic and move the slider to increase or decrease the resolution to taste. Then hop on over to Image > Adjustments > Posterise to limit the number of available colours, thereby creating a more accurate ‘Pixel Art’ styled image.
Some of these effects are more effective than others, and there’s a bunch of others you could try to refine your designs, making them more personal and unique. But between you and me, I’ve never really been satisfied with these options. More often than not, they feel too generic with no sense of uniqueness. They’re fine as a starting point. But if your skills feel lacking, then it might be best to look elsewhere - like how about letting a complex AI algorithm to do all the hard work for you. It’s time to unleash Adobe Firefly's AI.
How to create artistic effects with Adobe Firefly
You can access Firefly directly from within Photoshop, but it's also available as a standalone app for $10 a month. Use your browser to visit Adobe Firefly here and let’s get started.
Just like for Photoshop, you can try Firefly free for a week, although you can’t create anything without selecting a plan first. Once you’ve passed that hurdle, click on the blue ‘New’ button, top left of the interface, choose ‘Image’ from the drop down menu, then select ‘Upload’.
Having done that, you can pretty much ignore the tools in the left sidebar: Prompt is already selected, and we won’t be needing the others. What could be of interest is the menu currently set to ‘Gemini 3.1 (w/ Nano Banana 2)’. This is the algorithm Firefly will use to generate the image for you. There are 9 other to choose from, but if you’re not sure what they do, your best option would be to leave well enough alone.
So onto the prompt field we go. Let’s keep it simple and request Firefly to “transform this photo into a painting.” This will cost me 60 credits (that’s right: not only do you have to pay each month, but your requests must also be paid for with credits - you get a set monthly number, but you can also get an additional subscription to increase that amount).
To be honest, the result was somewhat lacklustre. You can tell something had happened to the photo but it was really subtle - the dangers of being too vague when prompting, I’m guessing. Still, it only took under a minute for the result to be produced.
Maybe I’ll have more luck with a second try: “transform this image into a cartoon, with thick black edges”. Or 'Ligne claire', to give it its proper name.
Now that’s more like it! The transformed landscape I provided wouldn’t feel out of place in a beautiful graphic novel. I’d almost expect Tintin to appear in the next panel, in the middle of one of his adventures. Definitely worth the 60 credits.
And for my final attempt, lets see what it can do with Pixel Art: “transform this photo into pixel art.” Again I think I was being too vague with my prompting. Firefly did as requested, and pixelated the image, but the colours were far too rich, although trying again and restricting the palette to only 16 colours gave it a more acceptable computer game-like feel.
But I have to admit I wasn’t entirely satisfied. The best one was the cartoon, but I think this is all down to how much detail you put in your prompt, to enable the AI to do all the right hard work for you.
Not only that, though, but I’m very aware of the expense: 60 credits a pop, and at least $10 a month can soon add up. So let’s take a look at another service Adobe offers: Adobe Express, where I’ll try to expand on my new-found experience with prompting.
How to create artistic effects with Adobe Express
Abode Express isn’t a pared down version of Photoshop. It’s definitely its own thing, aimed at providing cloud-based tools to help you quickly create posts for social media, videos, flyers, you name it, pretty much anything you can create based on a myriad of existing templates.
You might be wondering how templates help turn a photo into a painting, a drawing or pixel art, but that’s because Adobe Express has a few other tricks up its virtual sleeve which are, amazingly, free, and should help us achieve our goal in next to no time. So let’s visit Adobe Express here and get on with some digital wizardry.
Despite the fact you can use parts of Express for free, you still need to log in with your Adobe ID. Since even a free account grants you 5GB of online storage, that’s where all your projects will be stored until you choose to download them to your computer.
OK, let’s upload a photo. Click on the blue circle with a white cross, top left of the interface, followed by ‘Upload media’. Once you’ve found your chosen image, you’ll be given three options: ‘Edit original image’, ‘Remove background’, and ‘Add to a new design’. We’re aiming for the former.
Now you might feel cheated or maybe at worse deceived by me once you access the main interface: there are no obvious tools to make any alterations to an image like I showed you with Photoshop.
But bear with me as there's a method to my apparent madness.
Top left, just to the right of the title ‘Adobe Express’ is a toggle button. It’s not on by default as that feature is still in Beta, but that’s what we need: turn on the ‘AI Assistant’. Yes, we’re venturing into AI once more…
After agreeing to all the Beta caveats, a text field appears just beneath the image, with the caption ‘Describe what to create or edit’. That’s right: it’s a standard text prompt for generative AI.
This time, instead of merely turning my photo into a painting, I thought I’d get more descriptive: “Turn this photo into a painting in the style of Vincent van Gogh”…
It took a few seconds to achieve, but the result was excellent, complete with all the traditional colourful swirly patterns you’d casually expect from a van Gogh painting.
So that’s one down, how will this AI handle 'cartoonising' a photo?
The biggest hurdle with AI, as I discovered, is how to word a prompt that will yield the best results. Always a tricky one… so I attempted “transform this photo into a cartoon inspired by drawings from the 70s."
It took again mere seconds for Firefly to come back with a drawing that epitomises the style of that period, complete with a seriously restricted colour palette and covered in halftone dots. I’ll be honest with you, I would not have been able to recreate this myself in Photoshop, not without spending hours on it, yet with no effort on my part whatsoever, here was the cartoon, all done and dusted, ready to be downloaded.
This leads us to our last challenge, and frankly as Adobe’s AI aced the last two, there’s really no reason to doubt it won’t succeed with this one. My prompt for this was “transform this photo into pixel art inspired by computer games of the 80s”.
It didn’t take too long for AI to transform the scene into something that matched my request, and again, there was no artistic involvement from myself, just a request for some complex algorithms to produce what I had requested.
The results lead to three vastly different images, where the man in the photo was somehow aged considerably for the Van Gogh painting, and gradually appeared younger as my requests progressed. The point here is that the flexibility is potentially limitless.
But before you get too excited, there are limitations: impressed as I was with the Van Gogh painting, I went on a prompting spree, and asked Firefly to do a painting in the style of Salvador Dali, Picasso, and - here’s a challenge for it: Cubism.
All these are distinct and surreal styles, which Firefly failed miserably at: none of them matched what I asked. Why weren’t the man and his dog melted, why were their eyes on different sides of their faces, why weren’t they cubed?
That’s the thing with AI: it can look good, and if you’re lucky, it can produce impressive-looking work, but at the end of the day, it isn’t human, and may fail to grasp the essence of what you’re after. Having said that, I was, and still am, quite satisfied with those first three attempts.
I couldn’t find any limit when working in Adobe Express. Unlike Firefly Standard, I could ask Firefly whatever I wanted, and it kept producing the goods without using any credits or requesting payment.
Maybe it’s because this service is still in Beta, or maybe the free account has a generous number of free AI creations you can ask for, I’m not sure, but if you’re on a budget and want to explore what Adobe’s Firefly can do, then Adobe Express is most definitely the service to choose.
