Seven treatments with live previews of your own photo. Press Shuffle until one fits, hold Compare to check it against the original.
Every effect here is arithmetic on pixels, so it runs in your browser with nothing sent anywhere; the badge under the upload counts the bytes that leave this page while you work. Free, no watermark, no account. Send the result to the editor and put your title on top.
Drag, drop or paste · JPG, PNG, WebP · larger than 2,000 px is scaled down first, and the page says so
Effect
Strength
Cell size
Colours
Every treatment below changes how a photo reads at feed size, and that is the only test that matters for a thumbnail. A halftone that looks striking at full screen can turn to mud at 168 pixels wide. That is why the preview is your own photo rather than a sample, why Compare is a hold rather than a toggle, and why the result goes to the Autopsy in one click, so you can see the treatment at the size a viewer actually sees it.
| Effect | What it does to the pixels | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Dither, Bayer | Converts the photo to two colours using an ordered 8 × 8 threshold pattern, so tone becomes a regular texture of dots | Retro and game-console framing. Reads cleanly at any size because the pattern is regular. |
| Dither, Floyd-Steinberg | Two colours again, but the rounding error at each pixel is pushed to its neighbours, so tone becomes an organic, noisy grain | Zine and print aesthetics. Richer than Bayer up close; check it at feed size. |
| Halftone | Rebuilds the photo as a grid of ink dots whose size follows brightness, the way newspapers and screen prints do | Comic, poster and sports layouts. Large cells are bold; small cells look like a photograph again. |
| Duotone | Maps every pixel's brightness onto a gradient between a shadow colour and a light colour | The most useful one for thumbnails: a photo in your channel's two colours behind white text stays legible and looks designed. |
| Grain | Adds film grain from a random tile and a soft vignette, leaving colour and detail alone | When a clean photo looks too corporate. Vlog, documentary and cinematic framing. |
| ASCII | Divides the photo into cells and draws a character in each whose density matches the brightness | Tech, coding and terminal aesthetics. Keep cells small or the face disappears. |
| Pixel art | Downsamples to blocks and reduces the colour count, then scales back up with hard edges | Retro game framing and stylised portraits. Strength controls how few colours survive. |
Strength means something different per effect and the label under the picker says what: contrast for the dithers, dot size for halftone, how far the duotone replaces the original colour, grain density, and colour count for pixel art. Cell size sets the dot, block or character size for the effects that have one. Ink and Paper are the two colours the dithers, halftone and ASCII draw with; Shadow and Light are the two ends of the duotone gradient. Shuffle picks a different effect, a fresh palette and new settings at once, because the honest way to find a treatment is to look at several, not to reason about sliders.
A dither, a halftone or a duotone is a few lines of arithmetic per pixel. Nothing about it needs a server, so sending your photo to one would add upload time, a privacy question and a cost, and buy nothing. The badge under the upload counts request bytes leaving this page from the moment you pick a file until you download, and you can open the network panel and check the number yourself. Images larger than 2,000 pixels on the long side are scaled down before processing so a phone can keep up; the page tells you the size it worked at and how long the effect took, measured, not estimated.
Copy settings link puts the effect, strength, cell size, colours and colour mode after the # in the address, the part of a URL a browser never sends to a server. The photo is not in it. Open the link, drop a different photo, and the same treatment is applied, which is how you keep one look across a whole channel without saving presets anywhere.
Choose, drag, drop or paste an image. It is read into your browser's memory and never leaves it; the byte counter shows that as you work.
The picker shows each effect on your own photo. Adjust strength, cell size and the two colours, and hold Compare to see the original underneath.
Save a PNG or JPG, or open the result in the editor to add your title and cut-out. Copy settings link keeps the treatment so you can reuse it on the next photo.
Keep going without re-uploading — your image carries over to the next tool automatically.