About the Photo Filters
Each look is a small function applied to every pixel. Sepia and vintage use the well known colour matrices that mix the three channels into a warm monochrome. Noir converts to luminance and then stretches the contrast around mid grey. Fade lifts the black point so the darkest tones sit at around forty five rather than zero, which is what gives a washed film print its softness. Vivid pushes each channel away from its own luminance to raise saturation without touching hue. Duotone and sunset map brightness onto a two colour ramp.
The Strength dial blends the treated pixel back toward the untouched one, so fifty percent gives exactly half the effect. That is more useful than it sounds: most of these looks are too strong at full power on an already colourful photograph, and pulling them back to sixty or seventy percent leaves the character without the costume. Brightness, saturation and vignette are applied afterwards and stack on top of whatever look you picked.
Everything runs on the pixel buffer rather than on a CSS filter string, so the result you download is exactly what the preview shows, with no dependence on how a particular browser implements filter shorthand. Photographs are saved as JPG by default, since these treatments produce smooth gradients that JPEG handles well; switch to PNG if the source has hard edged graphics or transparency to protect. For a single conversion to plain grey with no other change, Grayscale Image is the simpler tool.
How to use
- Drop a photograph onto the left pane.
- Pick a Look, then pull Strength back until the effect feels right.
- Nudge brightness and saturation, and add a Vignette to draw the eye inward.
- Download the treated photo as JPG or PNG.
Common questions
- What does the strength dial actually do?
- It blends the filtered pixel with the original one, so twenty percent applies a fifth of the effect and one hundred percent applies all of it.
- Do these filters change the original file?
- No. The original stays on your disk untouched and a new copy is created for download.
- Which look suits a product photo?
- Clarity or vivid at around sixty percent adds punch without shifting colours far enough to misrepresent the product.
- Can I stack two looks?
- Download the result and drop it back in, then choose the second look. Each pass works on the pixels of the file you supply.