How to Apply Emboss Effect on image in Pillow in Python

Pillow - Embossing effect on image

To apply embossing effect on an image using Pillow library, you can use Image.filter() function with ImageFilter.EMBOSS kernel.

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Steps to emboss an image

Follow these steps to apply embossing effect on a given image.

1. Import Image, and ImageFilter modules from Pillow library.
2. Read input image using Image.open() function.
3. Call filter() function on the read Image object and pass ImageFilter.EMBOSS as argument to the function. The function returns the embossed image as PIL.Image.Image object.
4. Save the returned image to required location using Image.save() function.

Syntax of filter() function

The syntax of filter() function from PIL.Image module is

PIL.Image.filter(filter_kernel)

Parameter	Description
filter_kernel	A filter kernel that applies to the given image. To apply embossing effect on this image, you can use ImageFilter.EMBOSS filter kernel.

Returns

The function returns a PIL.Image.Image object.

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Examples

1. Emboss given image

In the following example, we read an image test_image.jpg, apply embossing effect on this image using Image.filter() function, and save the embossed image as embossed_image.jpg.

Python Program

from PIL import Image, ImageFilter

# Open the image
image = Image.open("test_image.jpg")

# Emboss effect on the image
embossed_image = image.filter(ImageFilter.EMBOSS)

# Save the resulting image
embossed_image.save("embossed_image.jpg")

Original Image [test_image.jpg]

Resulting Image with EMBOSS filter [embossed_image.jpg]

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Summary

In this Python Pillow Tutorial, we learned how to apply embossing effect on a given image using PIL.Image.filter() function, with the help of examples.