Photo Filters

How to apply filters to a photo

1. Drop a photo on the drop zone, or click it to choose one. JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and AVIF work; HEIC works in Safari.
2. Start from a preset: Vivid, Black & white, Vintage, Warm, Cool, Faded or Dramatic. Original puts every setting back to neutral.
3. Fine-tune with the Adjustments sliders: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue shift, Grayscale, Sepia, Blur, Sharpen and Vignette. Moving a slider after choosing a preset keeps the preset as a starting point.
4. Drag the Before / after divider: the part of the preview left of the line shows the original photo, the right part shows the filtered result.
5. Choose the Output format and, for JPG or WebP, the Quality, then click Download edited photo. Reset settings returns to the original look.

The preview is computed on a reduced copy so that sliders stay smooth. The download is recomputed on the full-resolution photo, so it keeps every pixel of the original.

What each adjustment does

• Brightness multiplies every color channel: 120 % makes the picture 20 % brighter, 80 % darker. Highlights that reach pure white are clipped.
• Contrast pushes tones away from mid-gray (above 100 %) or pulls them towards it (below 100 %). 0 % gives a flat gray image.
• Saturation controls color intensity. 0 % removes all color; 150 % gives punchy, poster-like colors.
• Hue shift rotates every color around the color wheel, in degrees. Small shifts (±10°) warm or cool a picture; 180° inverts hues while keeping brightness.
• Grayscale blends towards a black and white version weighted by human luminance perception (about 21 % red, 72 % green, 7 % blue), the same weights used by the CSS grayscale() filter.
• Sepia blends towards the warm brown tone of old prints.
• Blur is a Gaussian blur whose radius is relative to the picture size, so the preview and the full-size export look the same.
• Sharpen runs a 3 × 3 convolution kernel (an “unsharp” Laplacian) over the pixels to accentuate edges. Browsers have no sharpen filter, so it is computed in JavaScript.
• Vignette darkens the corners progressively while leaving the center untouched, which draws the eye towards the subject.

Browser support and privacy

Where the browser supports canvas filters, the color adjustments run on the graphics card. In Safari versions without canvas filters, this tool applies the same color matrices in JavaScript, so the result is the same everywhere. Photos are processed entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and the downloaded file is a fresh encode without the original EXIF metadata (camera, GPS). If your photo shows the wrong way up in other apps, it is because the original relied on an orientation tag: this tool already applies it to the pixels.

Tips

• For a classic black and white photo, pick Black & white, then raise Contrast a little and add some Vignette.
• Sharpen after resizing, not before: a small amount (15 to 30 %) is usually enough. Too much creates halos around edges.
• Keep PNG for graphics and screenshots, JPG at 85–92 % for photos.