Artistic and other creative effects can be applied to all or parts of a digital image using filters. Filters are part of many image editing programs.
Filters effects can make a photo look like a water color, oil painting or pencil scetch. Add a canvas, burlap or other textured background if desired. There are filters to blur, sharpen, distort and add or remove noise.
By applying a filters you can change the color of an image to a single one, converted it to black and white or a sepia tone. The possibilities for adding and varying creative filter effects are virtually endless.
To change the intensity of a filter, some programs let you "fade" the effect directly after it is applied. If you use layers, the transparency of the layer where the filter was applied can be reduced.
If you don't have a photo editing program that has filter effects, try a free program such as PhotoFiltre or Picasa. What follows are a few sample filters applied to the original image above.
