What it does
Tiles the image with shaped cells, from squares and hexagons to organic crystal facets, with grout spacing and tone-driven tile sizing.
Pixelation and mosaic are close relatives with different manners. Pixelation snaps the image to a bare grid of squares, edge to edge, and reads as censorship or low resolution. A mosaic reads as craft, and the difference lives almost entirely in the joints: real tiles have silhouettes, and real tilework has grout, the thin lines of setting material between the pieces. Keep that spacing even and the tiles shaped, and the same grid of color samples stops saying video game and starts saying hand-set tile. The grout line, not the tile, is the load-bearing detail.
At the other end of the spectrum the grid dissolves entirely. Photoshop shipped Crystallize decades ago: the image shatters into irregular cells, each a flat facet of color, like frost on a window or hammered glass. Underneath, the cells are a Voronoi diagram, the mathematics of territories, where every pixel belongs to its nearest seed point. The interesting space is between the two poles: sliding the seed points from a perfect grid toward full scatter morphs rigid tilework into organic facets by degrees, and animating that slide melts one into the other on screen.
Tiles do not have to be uniform either. Letting each tile’s size follow the brightness of the image beneath it, shrinking in the shadows or shrinking in the highlights, turns the tiling into a tone engine: the picture’s light and dark structure gets carried by the pattern itself, a halftone in full color and any shape. The whole lattice can rotate so the tiling runs diagonal to the frame. And on video the lattice holds still while the footage plays through it, each tile flickering as the scene changes underneath, like a wall of tiny screens.
Signature looks
Bathroom tile
Small square tiles with clean grout on a solid ground. Domestic, orderly, and instantly readable as tilework rather than pixels.
Stained glass
Irregular crystal facets with dark seams, each cell a flat pane of color. Frost at small sizes, cathedral window at large.
Honeycomb
A true hexagonal tiling, the tightest packing nature knows. Geometric without the rigidity of a square grid.
Try it on your own footage
This effect runs live in the Modulate editor, with layers, effect chains, masks, and keyframes. Free, no signup, nothing to install.
Common questions
What is a mosaic effect?
It converts an image into a field of shaped tiles, each colored by the region of the picture it covers and separated from its neighbors by grout spacing. The tile shape sets the character: squares and hexagons read as architectural tilework, triangles and diamonds as geometric pattern, and irregular facets as crystal or stained glass. It runs on video as well as stills, with the tiling fixed in place while the picture moves through it.
Is a mosaic effect the same as a photo mosaic?
No. A photo mosaic reconstructs a picture out of thousands of smaller photographs, chosen so their average colors assemble the larger image; it is a montage technique. A mosaic effect rebuilds the image from flat colored tiles, like physical tile or glass work. They share a name and nothing else.
What is the crystallize effect?
Crystallize is the mosaic’s organic cousin, popularized as a Photoshop filter: the image breaks into irregular flat-colored cells that resemble crystal facets or frost. Mathematically the cells form a Voronoi diagram grown from scattered seed points. In Modulate the same control runs continuously from a perfect grid to fully scattered facets, so crystallize is one end of a range rather than a separate filter.
What is the difference between mosaic and pixelate?
Pixelate averages the image into bare squares with no spacing, a pure resolution reduction. Mosaic gives each cell a silhouette and a grout line, offers shapes a pixel grid cannot, and can vary tile size with the brightness of the image underneath. Pixelate hides detail; mosaic restyles it.
Can you apply a mosaic effect to video?
Yes, and the fixed lattice is what makes it work: the tiles stay put while the footage changes inside them, so motion reads as tiles flickering in place, closer to a stadium card stunt than to a filter. In Modulate the mosaic effect runs live on images and video in the browser.
Related effects
Pixelate effect
Rebuilds the image as a grid of solid blocks, with a choice of how each block picks its color, grid rotation, and brick-style row stagger.
Halftone effect
Turns the image into printed dot patterns, from single-color newspaper dots to full four-ink color screens.
Dither effect
Early computer graphics look: the image is rebuilt from tiny dot patterns and a limited color palette.
Pixel art effect
Redraws the image at a tiny resolution with a retro color palette, ordered dithering, and optional dark outlines, like a hand-made sprite.