Photo to illustration

Two things you can do with a photo

Use it as a photo. Adjust light, contrast, colour and warmth, and apply one of the curated looks. That is a free, on-device feature. Plenty of beautiful books are made entirely this way — a travelogue of real photographs is often better than an illustrated one.

Turn it into an illustration. With Studio Plus, the app can describe the photo, show you that description as an editable prompt, and generate a storybook illustration based on it.

The description is yours to edit

The app prepares a copy of the photo with its metadata stripped — no location, no camera details, no timestamps — and asks a vision model to describe what is in it. That description comes back into an editable text field.

Read it. Change it. It is the single most useful control in the whole app: if the description says “a boy in a red coat by a lake” and you change it to “a boy in a red coat by a lake, in the style of a soft watercolour picture book, warm evening light”, that is what gets made.

Camera or gallery, and neither is required

You can take a new photo, pick one from your gallery, or skip photos entirely and work from sketches. If you refuse the camera or photo permission, the app keeps working — the drawing canvas and your project library are still there. It will ask again only when you tap something that genuinely needs it.

Where the file goes

An imported photo is copied into your project under its own asset ID. Your original photo in your camera roll is never modified, moved, or deleted. Edits are stored as a recipe plus a derived file, so you can always get back to the original inside the app.