How to Apply Aritstic effect to images and methods used to achieve it?

I am a newbie开发者_开发问答 and i would like to give artistic effects to the images such as photocopy , blur ,glow edge, mosaic bubble ,pencil sketch ,marker , glass effect,paint brush,glow diffused effect programatically?

I want to implement it and any input is appreciated. The following link depicts what i want to do exactly...

http://picasaweb.google.com/ashish.j.soni/BloggerPictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCMPHzP2P_fjRlgE#5413931800038472178

I believe that these effects are implemented in the GIMP.

The source code is available online http://www.gimp.org/source/ This may help you see how such algorithms are implemented.

You should check OpenCV, it will make your life easier. It is aimed at real-time computer vision, Not really what you are after, but it has a lot of useful functionality (eg. opening/saving different image formats) and standard image operations.

Matlab/octave is also a good tool to get feeling with image processing algorithms.