Style offers Prisma-like photo styling for the desktop

Desktop image editors have been offering effects like "Oil Painting" and "Pencil Sketch" for years, without anyone paying much attention, but the rise of the smartphone has created a whole new market for these photo-transforming tricks.

Style is a Prisma-like tool for Windows and Mac which converts regular photos into works of art using various classic styles.

Setup proved difficult on our test Windows 10 laptop. This could be a very temporary problem and we’ve spelled out the details on the download page, but essentially we had to manually download and run the program’s one-click installer file (https://style.hunterinthewoods.com/Style.application).

Style has a very basic interface. There’s a button to load an image, a list of styles, an optional choice of resolutions and a Process button when you’re ready to go.

The program has a long list of styles to choose from, including Acrylic, Ascii, Ballpoint, Colored Pencil Lines, Composition, Cubist, Dot Drawing, Edtaonisl, Finger Painting, Jagged, John Constable, Kanagawa, Kandinsky, Mandelbrot, Moving Castle, Oil Painting, Outline, Pencil Drawing, “Sand from Gobi Desert”, Seurat, Starry Night, Stone Art, The Scream and Watercolor.

This isn’t as impressive as it sounds. Many of the styles work in very similar ways -- apply a texture, emboss or smooth the image, shift the colors -- and they only rarely match their names. There’s no way to tweak any of the effects, either.

There are worthwhile exceptions. As with similar programs, the Kandinsky style stood out for radically transforming our pictures while preserving the detail that mattered. Pencil Sketch was a highlight, too.

Style’s free version unsurprisingly does its best to persuade you to upgrade, adding a watermark to the image (bottom-right rather than center), limiting output to a maximum 1024×1024 and displaying an occasional nag screen.

Purchasing a license gets rid of these restrictions, but it’s relatively expensive on the PC at $19.99 ($9.99 for the Mac).

Overall, we’d say Style deserves a few minutes of your time if you like this type of tool. But for real transformations and top-quality artwork, we’re going to stick to Fotosketcher.

Style is available for 64-bit Windows 7 and later, and Mac.