So you're no oil painting. This software could change all that

If you always wished to paint like Van Gogh but were limited to taking rather than painting pictures, help is at hand. An American scientist – and separately, a company set up by a British scientist – have developed software which can turn the humblest snap into something that could have come from a great artist.

Dr Aaron Hertzmann, of New York University, has developed a program which can analyse a digital photograph and transform it into the style of any chosen artist. The software was inspired when he began wondering whether a computer could analyse an artist's style and then apply it to pictures. For example, given a picture of some sunflowers, and a scan of Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting, Dr Hertzmann's program would analyse the relationship between the coloured pixels – or dots – in the photo, and the overall image of the painting.

That would produce a set of relationships between real sunflowers and Van Gogh's versions of them which could be applied to any other photo; in effect, the program would "see" with Van Gogh's artistic eye.

Separately, a British company called Segmentis is developing similar systems which could "create a whole new genre of painting, where you take digital pictures and create a new style", said Professor Andrew Bangham from the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. He said that the Segmentis approach differed from Dr Hertzmann's in that it simplified pictures, by removing strong tones while retaining edges, to produce a watercolour effect.

Such software has more benefits than making pictures look classy, said Eugene Fiume, from the University of Toronto. "This work gets people thinking about what constitutes an artist's style," he said.