Choose which colours turn light and which turn dark, the way film photographers did with coloured filters.
Presets named for what they do (a red filter for dramatic skies, a green filter for foliage, sepia, high contrast), a three-channel mixer if you want to go further, and a contrast slider. It runs on your device; nothing is uploaded.
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JPG, PNG, WebP, up to 25 MB
Preset
Channel mixer
Tone
Choose, drag, drop or paste a JPG, PNG or WebP up to 25 MB. It opens in the Luminance preset, the neutral conversion, with the original under the compare slider.
Tap a preset to see what it does to skies, skin and leaves, then move the red, green and blue sliders and the contrast to taste. Add a sepia or cool tone if you want one.
Save a full-size PNG, or a JPG at 92% quality for a smaller file, or open the result in the editor to add text for a thumbnail or a poster.
Every colour photo has three channels, red, green and blue. Turning it black and white means deciding how much each channel contributes to the grey. Remove the colour with equal weights and a red jacket and a green lawn can come out the same grey, so the picture goes flat. The mixer lets you decide instead: weight red heavily and anything red goes light while anything blue goes dark.
Film photographers did exactly this with coloured glass over the lens, because black and white film saw all colours fairly evenly. A red filter blocked blue light, so a blue sky printed almost black and white clouds jumped out of it. The presets here are those filters as channel weights, applied to your photo's pixels.
| Preset | Red / Green / Blue | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Luminance | 21 / 72 / 7 | The Rec. 709 brightness weights, rounded to whole percent: grey matches how bright each colour looks to the eye. The neutral starting point. |
| Red filter | 100 / 0 / 0 | Blue sky goes nearly black, clouds stand out, skin turns pale and smooth because red light hides blemishes. The classic dramatic landscape. |
| Orange filter | 70 / 30 / 0 | Most of the red filter's sky without as much bleached skin. A good default for portraits outdoors. |
| Yellow filter | 50 / 50 / 0 | A mild darkening of blue sky, close to how the scene looked to the eye. |
| Green filter | 10 / 80 / 10 | Leaves and grass go light and separate from each other; lips and ruddy skin go darker. |
| Blue filter | 0 / 0 / 100 | Haze and fog get heavier, skies go pale, freckles and skin texture show more. Moody, and unflattering on most portraits. |
| Sepia | 21 / 72 / 7, warm tone | Luminance with warm brown added to the midtones, the look of old chemically toned prints. Pure black and pure white stay neutral. |
| High contrast | 21 / 72 / 7, contrast +50 | Pushes greys away from the middle, for a punchy print or a thumbnail that has to read at small size. |
For each pixel, grey = red × R% + green × G% + blue × B%. When R, G and B add up to 100%, overall brightness stays about where it was; above 100% the picture brightens and whites clip, below it darkens. Negative values are allowed and subtract that colour, so anything of that colour goes darker still: at Red 150, Green -50 a red flower glows against near-black leaves. Contrast then stretches the grey away from mid grey: new = (grey - 128) × (1 + contrast / 100) + 128. Tone adds colour to the middle greys only, fading to nothing at black and at white, so a sepia print still has clean whites.
A black and white background is the simplest way to make one coloured element pop: a bright title, a red circle, a cut-out subject in full colour. Convert the photo here with High contrast, open it in the editor, and put your colour on top. For a print or poster that needs flat tones instead of a smooth photo, the posterize tool reduces it to a set number of greys, and the stencil maker takes it down to pure black and white.
Keep going: the black and white photo carries over to the next tool with no re-upload.