There is a specific, slightly absurd project that comes up more often than you would expect: you photograph a mural on a wall, and then you want a print of that mural to hang on a wall. Straight reproduction is easy and usually disappointing — a photo of paint reads as a photo of paint. What people actually want is the feel of the painting, held together well enough that it works as a piece on its own.
That is a two-step job, and the image to image tool handles both steps if you keep them separate instead of trying to do everything in one pass. The order matters more than the settings.
Step one: fix the photograph as a photograph
Do not start with style. Start by making the source photo honest. A mural shot from the street carries perspective distortion, uneven daylight, and whatever was in front of the wall. None of that is part of the artwork, and every bit of it will be preserved and exaggerated by a style pass.
Correct the perspective so the wall is square to the frame. Crop out the sidewalk, the parked car, the sign. If the shot has a strong gradient from a shadow across one corner, either fix it or crop it out, because a style conversion will turn that shadow into a dark smear in the middle of the painting that no one asked for.
Then evaluate color. Murals photographed in shade come back blue; ones shot at golden hour come back orange. If you have a reference — another photo, a color swatch, your memory — correct toward it now. This is the last point where color correction is predictable. After a style pass, the palette is entangled with the style itself and pulling one color back without shifting the rest becomes guesswork.
Step two: choose a style that matches the paint, not the subject
The trap here is choosing a style based on what the mural depicts. A mural of a harbor does not need a seascape painter's style. It needs a style that matches the way the mural was actually painted.
Look at the wall. If the mural is flat color with hard edges, a poster or screenprint style keeps that. If it is loose brushwork, a gouache or oil style keeps that. If it is spray paint with soft gradients and stencils, a style that keeps hard masked edges and airbrushed transitions will read as true, while an oil-painting style will read as a lie. This is why style transfer results so often look wrong: the style and the source's own material language are fighting.
Strength is the other half of this decision. Push it high and you get a painting that no longer resembles the wall. Push it low and you get a photo with a filter. The useful range for a mural is usually moderate, high enough that brushwork and edge handling change, low enough that the lettering, figures, and composition survive. Test three strengths on a crop before running the full image, because the full image costs more and tells you less.
Protect the parts that carry meaning
A mural almost always has elements that must not be reinterpreted: a name, a date, a portrait of someone real, a specific landmark. Style conversion does not know which parts matter. It treats a face and a patch of sky with equal enthusiasm.
If the image has text, expect to lose it and plan to set it again afterwards. Lettering is the first casualty of any style pass, and regenerating until the text comes back clean is usually a waste of time. Paint it out, convert, and add the text back in a design tool with a typeface that matches the mural's hand.
For faces and important figures, run a version at lower strength, or convert the image in sections and composite the results. Converting the sky and background at a strong setting while keeping the figure at a light one gives you a painted wall with a figure that still looks like the actual person in it.
Finish for print, not for screen
Painted prints fail at the last step more often than the first. A conversion that looks great on a monitor can turn muddy on paper because ink cannot reproduce the same saturation and because the style pass has already pushed values together.
Before printing, check the histogram and pull the shadow end down so the darkest areas reach near black. Painted styles tend to lift blacks, and lifted blacks on paper look washed out rather than atmospheric. Then soft-proof against your printer's profile if you can, or order one small test print before committing to a large one.
Keep the corrected photo, the converted file, and the prompt and strength notes together in a folder. If the mural is repainted or you want the same treatment for a second wall, you will want all three, and reconstructing them from scratch is far more work than saving them. You can try the conversion here and run the three-strength test on a crop tonight.