Photo Filters

How to add a filter to a photo

1. Drag your photos onto the box above, or click to browse. You can select several at once.
2. Pick a filter preset, or move the brightness, contrast and saturation sliders by hand. The result is re-rendered after each change.
3. Click Download on any image, or Download all. Files are saved with filtered- at the start of the name.

The filters explained

Each preset is a fixed recipe built from the same few adjustments. Knowing the recipe tells you what to expect and when to choose something else.

• Grayscale — removes all color and keeps brightness, contrast and tones as they were. Good for checking whether a photo works without color.
• Sepia — a strong brown tone (80%) with a slight brightness lift. Gives an antique-print feel, and works best on portraits and old-looking buildings.
• Vintage — a lighter sepia tone (45%) combined with lower contrast and lower saturation, so blacks fade a little and colors look washed by time.
• Cool — rotates all hues around the color wheel by 190 degrees and boosts saturation slightly. It shifts every color rather than adding a uniform blue tint, so results vary with the photo and can look dramatic; try it on landscapes and sky shots first.
• Warm — a light sepia tone (30%) with extra saturation and a small brightness lift, for a golden-hour look on food, interiors and skin tones.
• B&W High Contrast — grayscale with contrast raised to 145%. Deep blacks and bright whites; suits architecture, street scenes and texture.
• Custom — chosen automatically when you move a slider.

Using the sliders properly

All three sliders run from 0 to 200, and 100 means no change. Brightness scales every pixel up or down; contrast pushes values away from or toward mid-gray; saturation controls color intensity, with 0 equal to black and white. Small moves matter: for natural-looking photos stay within about 85 to 120. Pushing brightness past 150 clips bright areas to pure white, and that detail cannot be recovered once saved.

One behavior to remember: moving any slider switches the filter to Custom and removes the tint (sepia, grayscale or hue shift) that a preset added. If you want a preset plus extra adjustment, you cannot layer a slider on top of it in this tool. Pick the closest preset, download it, and drop that file back in for a second pass with the sliders.

Practical uses

• Consistent social feeds. Small-business owners can apply the same warm or vintage setting to a batch of product photos so the whole grid looks like one brand.
• Bloggers. A black-and-white version of a hero image makes a good background for overlay text, because the lack of color keeps the letters readable.
• Photographers. Converting a frame to B&W High Contrast is a quick way to judge composition and light separate from color.
• Printing and documents. Grayscale versions save color ink for handouts; the grayscale image tool is a dedicated alternative.

Limits and quality notes

• Photos keep their original pixel size. PNG stays PNG and WebP stays WebP; any other format is saved as JPG at 92% quality.
• One setting applies to all photos in the batch. If one image is darker than the rest, process it separately.
• There is no crop, grain, blur or vignette, and no before-and-after comparison; to compare, keep the original file open next to the result.
• The effects rely on your browser's canvas filter support. If a downloaded file looks unfiltered, try a current version of Chrome, Edge or Firefox.
• Already-compressed JPGs are compressed one more time on export. For best quality, filter your original rather than a copy that has been saved repeatedly.

Is it private and safe?

Yes. Toolyard applies filters inside your browser on your own device. Your photos are never uploaded anywhere, so they stay completely private.

Related guides

See JPG vs PNG vs WebP for choosing a format, how to compress a JPEG without losing quality after editing, and how to build a color palette from a photo.