Need an advise for image processing/filtering

Posted 08 June 2012 - 07:57 AM

Hello everybody,

I'm new to this forum, so sorry if I placed the question in a wrong section - it might also fit C++ and/or web development sections.

I'm working on a web based game (text&images based to be precise) and I'll have to implement image processing/filtering in some way. What I'm trying to achieve is to upload an image through web interface and filter/process it, so it would look like hand drawn (to a reasonable level - I don't need super awesome and realistic graphics). I'm developing the game on Zend, so it's pure PHP. My question is, how can I implement this mechanism? So far I have a few ideas, but don't know how good they are:

1. Have some PHP libraries - would be ideal, because I would incorporate them into my code. However I couldn't find any decent ones - I need more than just brightness/contrast/color manipulation.
2. C++/C# libraries. I gave never tried, but I think it would be possible to glue C++/C# code with PHP in some way. I believe C++/C# handles images in a better way and have more possibilities. Can anybody recommendation such libraries?

Running images through Photoshop filters would definitely give me good looking images, but it's not an option as I cannot ask all my front-end users to install Photoshop and do the same.

Any recommendation, thoughts and discussions are very welcome!