Video and image effects
Every effect in the Modulate editor, explained: what it does, where the look comes from, and how to get it on your own images and video.
Everything runs online, in the browser, in real time. Most effects have a free tool you can use without an account, and all of them work on video, not just stills.
Adjust
Color and tone: levels, curves, posterize, hue shift, and gradient mapping.
Gradient map
A gradient map recolors an image by its brightness: every pixel is replaced with the color at the matching position along a gradient you design, darkest tones taking the gradient’s start and brightest taking its end. It is the fastest route to duotones, cinematic two-tone grades, and poster-style color reduction, because you are painting with the image’s own tonal structure.
Invert colors
Inverting colors flips every value to its opposite: white becomes black, red becomes cyan, blue becomes yellow, exactly like a photographic negative. But full inversion is only the beginning. Inverting brightness while keeping hues, flipping a single channel, or inverting only above a threshold each produce a different look, from x-ray to solarized print.
Posterize effect
The posterize effect collapses an image’s smooth gradients into a small number of flat tonal bands, so continuous shading becomes discrete steps. It is named for the poster printing it imitates, where every additional tone meant another pass of ink, and it is the fastest way to make a photograph read as a screen print, a protest poster, or a cel-shaded frame. The fewer the bands, the bolder the result.
Threshold effect
The threshold effect reduces an image to exactly two colors with a single hard cutoff: every pixel brighter than the chosen level takes one color, every pixel darker takes the other. Nothing blends and nothing fades, which is the point. It is the look of stencils, photocopies, and lith prints, the bluntest and most graphic move in image editing.
Hue shift
A hue shift rotates every color in an image around the color wheel by the same amount: reds become oranges, greens become teals, blues become purples, all together. Brightness and saturation stay where they were, so the image keeps its light and its depth while the palette walks around the wheel. Rotate far enough and you arrive back where you started, which is why an animated hue shift loops seamlessly.
Vignette effect
The vignette effect fades the edges and corners of the frame toward a color, classically black, so the image sits in a pool of light and the eye is pulled to the center. It began as a flaw: lenses pass less light at the edges of their image circle than through the middle. Photographers and colorists then adopted the flaw on purpose, because attention follows brightness, and a gentle edge falloff frames a subject without adding a single visible element.
Levels adjustment
Levels is the classic tone-correction tool: it remaps an image’s brightness range by choosing which input value becomes black, which becomes white, and how the midtones distribute between them. Read against the histogram, it is usually the first correction applied to any image, stretching a flat, hazy capture out to full contrast or deliberately compressing one into a faded look. Applied to the red, green, and blue channels individually, the same handles become a color-grading tool.
Curves adjustment
Curves is the most precise tone tool in image editing: a graph that maps every input brightness to an output brightness, edited by dragging points on a line. The untouched state is a straight diagonal, input equals output. Bending the line up brightens, bending it down darkens, and because you choose where along the range to place each point, you decide exactly which tones move and which stay anchored. Applied to the red, green, and blue channels separately, the same graph becomes full color grading.
Sharpen effect
The sharpen effect increases the perception of focus by boosting local contrast where the image already changes: edges get a brighter bright side and a darker dark side, and the eye reads the steeper transition as crisper detail. The standard machinery is the unsharp mask, a technique older than digital imaging, and it is an honest one: it makes real detail pop rather than inventing detail that was never captured.
Blur
Cinematic blurs: lens bokeh and tilt-shift miniature looks.
Lens blur
Lens blur reproduces what a camera lens does to the out-of-focus parts of a photograph. Instead of smearing detail evenly the way a gaussian blur does, it spreads every point of light into the shape of the lens aperture, so highlights bloom into the bright discs and polygons known as bokeh balls. The result reads as depth and optics rather than image processing, which is why it is the blur to reach for when the goal is a photographic look instead of simple softness.
Tilt-shift effect
The tilt-shift effect makes a real scene look like a tabletop miniature by keeping a narrow band in sharp focus and blurring everything above and below it. Shallow focus is one of the strongest scale cues the eye knows: tiny things photographed up close always have paper-thin depth of field, so when a full-size cityscape shows the same falloff, the brain concludes it must be small. The name comes from view-camera lenses that physically tilt to move the plane of focus.
Distort
Effects that move pixels: waves, warps, displacement, and lens artifacts.
Displacement map
A displacement map is an image that pushes another image around. For every pixel of the footage, the effect reads the map at the same spot and shifts that pixel by an amount driven by what it finds: values above a midpoint push one way, values below push the other, and the midpoint itself means no movement at all. It is the standard machinery behind heat haze, refraction, textured glass, and melt distortions in 2D compositing.
Wave effect
The wave effect bends an image with moving distortion, displacing every pixel along an animated field that behaves like water: concentric rings spreading from a point, directional waves rolling across the frame, or full turbulence, the swirling eddy motion of a liquid surface. Because the field is animated, a still image starts to move, which is why ripple treatments have been a fixture of title sequences, screensavers, and interactive water since the earliest days of computer graphics.
Spherize effect
The spherize effect wraps a flat image around a sphere, as if the picture were printed on the surface of a ball and photographed head-on. The center of the image reads close to true, then bends progressively as the surface turns away from the viewer, compressing to nothing at the silhouette. It is one of the oldest distortion filters in image editing, and it endures because the result is instantly legible: a flat picture becomes an object.
Chromatic aberration
Chromatic aberration is the lens flaw where colors focus at slightly different positions, leaving red and blue fringes along high-contrast edges. Glass bends short blue wavelengths more than long red ones, so the color channels of the image land slightly apart, worst toward the corners of the frame. Lens designers spend enormous effort correcting it; digital artists add it back on purpose, because a trace of fringing reads as a real camera and a heavy split reads as a signal breaking apart.
Edge warp effect
The edge warp effect leaves the middle of the image untouched and squeezes a stretched, magnified band of it around the frame edges, as if the picture were mounted behind thick curved glass. The center stays a clean safe zone, then the image accelerates toward the border and compresses into a rim that echoes the content inside it. It is the frame-hugging cousin of the pinch filter, built for title cards, album art, and backdrops that need a readable middle.
Reeded glass effect
The reeded glass effect reproduces the look of ribbed architectural glass: parallel rounded flutes that bend whatever sits behind them into repeating vertical slices, half legible and half abstracted. It is the shower-door and café-partition texture that interior design made ubiquitous, and applied digitally it puts any image, video, or piece of type behind that pane, diffusing it into privacy-glass stripes without losing its light or color.
Kaleidoscope effect
The kaleidoscope effect folds an image into repeating mirrored wedges around a center point, turning whatever it is given into radial symmetry. It is the digital descendant of the optical toy: where a physical kaleidoscope bounces light between angled mirrors, the effect samples the frame in polar coordinates and reflects one wedge of it around the circle, so any footage, photo, or piece of type becomes a live mandala.
Generate
Effects that draw new graphics from a layer: outlines and tracking markers.
Outline effect
An outline effect traces the silhouette of an image, the edge where its pixels meet transparency, and grows a band of solid color outward from it. That is the difference between an outline and a border: a border frames the rectangular canvas, an outline hugs the subject itself. It is the machinery behind sticker edges, die-cut badges, keylines around logos, and text that stays readable on any background.
Blob tracking
Blob tracking detects distinct regions of movement in video, called blobs, and follows each one from frame to frame, drawing bounding boxes, crosshair markers, and coordinate labels around them. The result is the machine-vision look: footage annotated by software that is watching it. Originally a computer-vision technique for counting and following objects, it has crossed over into music videos, concert visuals, and social edits as an aesthetic in its own right.
Metaballs
Metaballs are organic, blobby shapes defined by a field instead of an outline: each ball radiates influence that falls off with distance, the influences of nearby balls add together, and the visible shape is the line where the summed field crosses a threshold. That construction is why metaballs merge like drops of ink when they approach and pinch apart when they separate, the liquid behavior no ordinary shape can fake. Modulate’s Metablobs effect runs this in real time, melting an image or video into blobs that flow with the footage.
Field effect
The Field effect is a procedural noise generator: it synthesizes evolving organic patterns, drifting Perlin-style clouds, marbled veins, swirling flow, and Voronoi cells, from pure math, no source footage required. Noise of this kind is the raw material of generative design, the structured randomness that reads as natural texture rather than static, and here it renders in real time as an animated, loopable layer.
Bouncing text effect
The bouncing text effect sends a line of text travelling around the frame, bouncing off the edges, drifting, or orbiting, often trailing echoes of itself behind. Its most famous form is the DVD-player screensaver, the bouncing logo everyone waited to see land perfectly in a corner. As an effect it turns a word or short phrase into kinetic motion graphics you can drop over any layer.
Pixelate
Resolution as style: pixel art, mosaics, and pixel sorting.
Pixel art effect
The pixel art effect redraws an image or video at a tiny resolution with a limited color palette, so it reads as a hand-made sprite rather than a shrunken photograph. A convincing conversion is a chain: downsample to a virtual screen, snap every color to a palette like Game Boy or NES, dither the gradients, and outline the shapes. Skipping any of those steps is why plain pixelation never quite looks like pixel art.
Pixel sorting
Pixel sorting rearranges the actual pixels of an image along straight lines: contiguous runs of pixels that pass a brightness test are reordered by brightness, hue, or saturation, so each run becomes a smooth ramp and the image appears to bleed into streaks of light. Nothing is added and nothing is lost, every pixel survives in a new position, which is why sorted images keep an unmistakably photographic grain inside the abstraction.
Pixelate effect
The pixelate effect rebuilds an image as a grid of solid single-color blocks, each block standing in for everything underneath it. It is the mosaic of censored television and the texture of early graphics, and it looks deceptively simple: the entire character of the result hangs on one decision, how each block picks its color from the pixels it replaces.
Mosaic effect
The mosaic effect rebuilds an image out of shaped tiles, squares, hexagons, triangles, diamonds, or irregular crystal facets, each filled with the color of the image beneath it and separated by visible grout lines. It is the digital descendant of tesserae mosaic, where pictures were assembled from small pieces of stone and glass, and it spans the range from clean architectural tile to the classic crystallize look. It is not a photo mosaic, which reconstructs a picture from thousands of tiny photographs.
Tone pixelate effect
The tone pixelate effect splits an image into shadows, midtones, and highlights, then redraws each band as flat pixel blocks on its own grid, with its own color, its own outline, and its own block size. Because the three grids are deliberately different sizes, the bands interlock like layered paper cutouts instead of stacking into one mosaic. The photograph itself disappears; what remains is a bold flat-color print of its light, the pixelated poster look.
Screen
Analog display and signal emulation: VHS tape, CRT screens, NTSC broadcast.
VHS effect
The VHS effect makes digital video look like it was recorded and played back on tape: soft resolution, a wobbling image, tracking bands that tear across the frame, color that lags and bleeds behind the brightness, dropouts, and noise. Every one of those artifacts has a physical cause in the tape or the player, which is why a convincing VHS effect is a simulation of the machine, not a scanline overlay.
CRT effect
The CRT effect makes an image look like it is being displayed on a cathode-ray tube: the glowing phosphor stripes or dot triads of the mask, slight color fringing where the beams misconverge, and the darkened corners of a curved glass face. It is the look of every screen made before the 2000s, and it reads instantly as arcade cabinets, control rooms, and late-night TV.
NTSC effect
The NTSC effect makes video look like an analog television broadcast: edges that ring and smear, color that bleeds past its outlines, the beady shimmer of dot crawl along sharp boundaries, and, on a weak signal, snow and a hum bar drifting through the picture. Where a VHS effect simulates a worn tape, an NTSC effect simulates the signal itself.
Stylize
The big transformative looks: halftone, dither, datamosh, ASCII, and film grain.
Halftone effect
The halftone effect reproduces an image as a grid of dots whose size follows the brightness underneath: large dots where the image is dark, small dots where it is light. It comes from print, where a press can only put down solid ink, and it is why newspaper photos and comic panels dissolve into dots up close. Applied digitally, it turns any image or video into something bold, graphic, and unmistakably print-like.
Dither effect
Dithering renders an image with fewer colors than it really has by arranging the available ones in fine patterns the eye averages back into smooth tone. Where a limited palette would otherwise collapse gradients into ugly bands, dithering trades them for texture: the speckled, crosshatched grain of early computer graphics, GIFs, and one-bit displays. As an effect, it puts that machine-made texture on anything.
Risograph effect
The risograph effect recreates riso printing: an image rebuilt from a small set of bold spot inks, each printed as its own layer on paper and each slightly out of register with the others. The signature is flat, saturated fills with soft mottled coverage, stippled edges where tones fade out, and color fringes where the layers miss. It is the look of art-school posters and zines, and it is nothing like a photo filter.
Datamoshing
Datamoshing is a glitch technique that breaks the motion side of video compression: the decoder keeps applying fresh motion to stale pixels because the clean keyframes that would correct them are gone. Moving subjects smear into blocky trails, stopped motion keeps flowing, and the image only recovers when a new keyframe finally lands. It is the most cinematic glitch there is, because it is made of the video’s own movement.
ASCII art effect
The ASCII art effect rebuilds a picture out of text: the image is divided into a grid of character-sized cells, and each cell is replaced by a glyph whose visual weight matches the brightness underneath, a dense character where the image is dark, a sparse one where it is light. Squint and the photograph reappears; look closely and it is nothing but type. Applied to video, it becomes a living wall of characters.
Film grain effect
Film grain is the visible texture of the particles that formed a photographic image: silver crystals in black-and-white stock, the dye clouds they leave behind in color film. Every frame carries a fresh random arrangement of them, which is why grain flickers alive on a projector instead of sitting still. A film grain effect puts that texture on digital footage, and the honest way to do it is to synthesize the grain in the image itself rather than paste a scanned loop on top.
Glow effect
The glow effect, called bloom in game and film rendering, makes the bright parts of an image spill light past their own edges, the way a streetlamp flares in a night photo or a window overwhelms a camera pointed at the sun. It works by lifting everything above a brightness threshold, blurring that light at many scales at once, and adding it back over the image, so a highlight keeps a hot core while growing a halo that falls away the way real scattered light does.
Slit-scan effect
The slit-scan effect builds a picture out of time instead of space: different parts of the frame show the scene at different moments, so anything that moves gets stretched, sheared, and melted across its own recent past. It began as a physical camera technique, most famously in the stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its digital descendant is time displacement: a per-pixel map deciding how far back in time each pixel looks.
Echo effect
The echo effect leaves a decaying trail of recent frames behind anything that moves, so a gesture, a dancer, or a passing car is followed by a chain of dimming ghosts of itself. It works from real frame history: the last moments of video are kept in memory and composited back under the live frame, each echo older and fainter than the last, which is what separates a true motion trail from a simple blur.
Contour effect
The contour effect redraws an image as evenly spaced lines tracing its levels of brightness, exactly the way a topographic map traces levels of elevation. Treat luminance as terrain and every line marks where the image crosses one step of it: tight bands where light changes fast, wide open spacing where it changes slowly. The result reads as cartography of the frame, and on video the map redraws itself as the light moves.
FM Modulation effect
The FM modulation effect runs an image through the math of an analog video synthesizer: it reads each row of pixels as a signal, uses that brightness to bend a carrier wave, and redraws the result as flowing contour lines and stripes. Bright and dark areas push the lines apart or crowd them together, so the picture survives as a topographic pattern of bands rather than as pixels. It reads like a warped broadcast or a modular video patch.
Pattern Grid effect
The pattern grid effect lays a regular grid over an image and stamps a small icon or shape into every cell, choosing or sizing that stamp by the brightness underneath. It is the same idea as ASCII art or a halftone screen, but the marks can be any shapes you supply: dark cells pick a heavier shape or grow it larger, light cells pick a lighter one or shrink it. The picture reassembles out of repeated symbols.
Stipple effect
The stipple effect redraws an image as a field of ink dots, packing them dense and large in the dark areas and sparse and small in the light ones. It comes from pen-and-ink illustration, where artists build every tone out of nothing but dots and let the eye blend them back into shading. Applied to a photo or video it gives a hand-drawn, engraved, printed-in-ink texture.
Star glow effect
The star glow effect turns the brightest points of an image into small stars: thin rays of light radiating from each highlight around a hot glowing core. It is the digital form of the cross-screen filter, a camera filter etched with a fine grid of lines that diffracts every strong highlight into a starburst. Applied to an image or video, it lifts everything above a brightness threshold and streaks it outward in evenly spaced directions, so speculars on water, jewelry, candle flames, and city lights all catch and sparkle.
Common questions
Do these effects work on video?
Yes. Every effect in the library runs on video as well as images, with real-time playback while you adjust it. The free tools accept video too.
Are the effects free to use?
Most effects have a free browser tool that needs no account. The full editor, with every effect plus layers, masks, and keyframes, is free to start.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Everything runs in your browser on your GPU. With the free tools your media never leaves your computer unless you save it to a Modulate project yourself.
Can I combine effects?
Yes. In the editor, effects stack as layers and chains: run halftone under a VHS pass, mask where each one applies, and animate any parameter with keyframes.
Try them on your own footage
Every effect runs live in the Modulate editor, with layers, effect chains, masks, and keyframes. Free, no signup, nothing to install.