I think you’re looking to carve a 3D relief. To do that you need a depthmap (heightmap?), not simply a grayscale image. Basically the areas of the photo that would be closer to your view need to be lighter and those that are further away need to be darker. There is no way to automatically do that with a flat photo.
Many of the relief carvings you see start as a 3D model. There are cameras, even on some new phones, that can capture depth data. I don’t know too much about that. I looked into it a bit and gave up when I became limited by my older cell phone.
If you want to edit a photo manually, you’d want something like Photoshop or Gimp and a few hundred hours. At that point, you might as well learn to 3d model.
Got an example of what you want to do (end result) and an image you’re trying to use?
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