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FIELD REPORTS/IMAGE/ISSUE #76

Turn any photo into an anime scene

Photo-to-anime filters are usually a paid app feature: watermarked, rate-limited, and gone when the subscription ends. This week's pick is the open version. It is a small add-on for Alibaba's open image editor that redraws any photo as anime with one short prompt, and you can try it in the browser for free.

MODELQwen-Image-Edit-2509-Photo-to-Anime
PUBLISHEDJuly 20, 2026
READ TIME3 min
CATEGORYIMAGE

Field notes

01 What it does

You give it a normal photo and it redraws the whole frame as anime. The composition carries over: the pose, the outfit, the background, and the lighting stay where they were, so the result reads as your photo in anime form, not a random anime picture. A prompt as simple as "transform into anime" is enough, in English or Chinese. People, pets, food, and street scenes all work.

Technically it is a LoRA, a small add-on file that teaches an existing model one new skill, sitting on top of Qwen-Image-Edit-2509, Alibaba's open image editing model. That focus is the point: instead of a general editor doing a weak anime effect, this add-on does one job well. It is MIT licensed with over 36,000 downloads, so you can use the output freely, including commercially.

02 How to try it

Open the demo Space. Photo-to-Anime is already selected as the default style, so upload a clear, high-resolution photo, keep the prompt as "Transform into anime.", and generate. The demo runs on free shared GPUs, so expect a short queue at busy times.

Running it yourself takes the Qwen-Image-Edit-2509 base model and a capable GPU. The repo ships a ready ComfyUI workflow file, and the same LoRA loads in diffusers with a few lines of Python.

03 Caveat

The author's own demo went offline, so the link above goes to a community demo that bundles several editing styles; check that Photo-to-Anime is the selected adapter before you generate. Quality tracks the input: low-resolution or cluttered photos come back with mushy details, and small text, logos, and exact facial likeness may not survive the restyle. It also has one house style; if you want a specific look like Ghibli or 90s cel, this will not match it.

04 What you can do with it

  • Turn a portrait or a pet photo into an anime avatar for your profiles.
  • Redraw a travel photo as an anime wallpaper or poster.
  • Mock up webtoon or storyboard panels from staged phone photos.
  • Make anime versions of family photos as gifts or prints.
  • Give a photo series one consistent anime look for a blog or channel art.

Try the demo

View model page

Read this issue on neuralexpedition.com →