Have you ever wondered what you’d look like as an anime character? With the explosion of AI image tools over the past few years, transforming your ordinary photos into stylized anime portraits has become surprisingly easy and accessible to everyone. This guide walks you through two methods to turn a photo of yourself into an anime character.
Turn Yourself Into an Anime Character Using Drawever
There are many AI online tools that can turn a photo into an anime character, but many are paid, don’t deliver good results, or are difficult to use. If your goal is to stylize one photo of yourself as easily as possible, without paying a single dollar, I recommend Drawever, an online platform that empowers creators, designers, and digital enthusiasts with powerful AI-driven image transformation tools.
Using Drawever’s photo-to-anime tool, you can easily transform your favorite photos into stunning anime-style artwork with a free AI photo-to-anime converter tool.
To do so, open the photo-to-anime tool in your web browser, and select Anime as the style. As a free user, you can generate one medium-quality image. You can generate two more if you register; beyond that, you need to purchase credits.
To do the conversion, just drag and drop your photo to the designated area and choose the strength of the anime effect – the default setting of 40 is good. Click Generate Now. Once your anime portrait is ready, you can save it to your device.
The only problem with Drawever is that your photo will end up on Drawever servers and subject to its terms of use. If that’s something you don’t want, you can convert your photo locally with the below method.
Convert Photos to Anime Locally Using Stability Matrix
If you’re concerned about privacy or want more control over your anime transformations, Stability Matrix is an excellent alternative. It’s a multi-platform Package Manager and Inference UI for Stable Diffusion that makes it easy to set up everything you need to turn photos to anime characters locally on your computer. The best part? It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, giving you flexibility, regardless of your operating system.
To get started, you’ll need to download and install the latest binary from GitHub. Keep in mind that you’ll need a decent GPU – preferably an Nvidia card – to run Stable Diffusion smoothly. The more powerful your graphics card, the faster your transformations will process.
Once Stability Matrix is installed, you’ll need to install a UI for Stable Diffusion, the underlying AI that powers the transformations. I recommend WebUI, as it’s popular and relatively easy to use. The UI that’s included in Stability Matrix, unfortunately, doesn’t support image-to-image conversion, which is what you need to turn photos into anime characters.
To install WebUI, head to the Packages section in Stability Matrix. Click Add Package, select WebUI, and wait for the installation to complete. This may take a few minutes, depending on your Internet connection.
You’ll also need an anime model. You can find countless models on Civitai – an excellent popular option is Mistoon_anime. Download the model from Civitai and copy it to X:\StabilityMatrix\Data\Models\StableDiffusion. Alternatively, connect Stability Matrix to your Civitai account, then download the model directly from the Model Browser section of Stability Matrix.
With everything set up, you can go to Packages again and launch WebUI. In the WebUI interface, select the img2img tab. Choose the anime model you downloaded, such as Mistoon_anime, from the checkpoint drop-down.
Use the upload option to add the photo you want to convert, and set the Denoising Strength parameter. This controls how much the original image is transformed. A higher value (e.g., 0.7-0.9) will result in a more significant change, suitable for turning a photo into an anime character.
You also need to enter a positive prompt describing the desired output, such as “anime character, detailed, high quality, [specific features present in the original photo, like your hair length and color].” Use a negative prompt to exclude unwanted features, like “low quality, blurry, deformed.”
Finally, click Generate to start the conversion. Depending on your GPU, this could take a few seconds to a few minutes. Save the result once complete.
Keep in mind that this is just one of many methods to generate anime images locally using Stable Diffusion. I recommend that you take the time to explore what the world of AI image generation has to offer. Maybe you’ll discover far more uses for the emerging technology besides turning photos into anime characters.
All images and screenshots by David Morelo.
