A method and apparatus for enhancing a video image sent from a first terminal of a video-telephony system to a second terminal of the video-telephony system during a video telephony call. An image style is selected at the first terminal and a description of the image style is transmitted from the first terminal to the second terminal. A sequence of video images transmitted from the first terminal to the second terminal is modified by a style generator at the second terminal in accordance with description of the image style before being displayed at the second terminal. The first terminal includes a user interface that controls a style selector to produce the style description that defines the properties or the style such as a cropping region, a border style, an image filter, a background and an animation.