Matlab can be used for image processing tasks such as loading, displaying, and manipulating images. Images are represented as matrices where each element corresponds to the pixel intensity values. Common operations include convolutions using various kernel filters to perform tasks like smoothing, sharpening, and edge detection. Functions such as imread, image, and imshow can load and display images. Built-in functions such as fspecial generate common kernel filters. Convolution functions convolve images with kernels to apply filtering effects.