A computer-implemented image manipulation apparatus and method (200) configured to receiving an input image (202) and a desired style. The method can obtain a representation (204) of the input image selected from a plurality of stored representations of a plurality of images, wherein each said representation comprises data describing a set of image features. The method can modify image features in the obtained representation to correspond to the input image and/or the desired style to produce a modified representation (207), and render a reference image (209) based on the modified representation. A manipulated image is generated by performing a style transfer operation (210) on the input image using the rendered reference image. Embodiments may access a data store to find a group of stored images based on similarity between image content descriptors of groups of stored images and those of an input image to retrieve a stored reference image.