What it does
Redraws the image as a field of ink dots, large and dense in dark areas, small and sparse in light ones.
Stippling is one of the oldest ways to fake continuous tone with a single colour of ink. An etcher or an illustrator lays down thousands of dots by hand; where the dots crowd together the area reads dark, where they thin out it reads light. Scientific illustration and old banknote engraving lean on it because dots reproduce cleanly at any size, and the technique carries an unmistakable made-by-hand patience.
It is a close cousin to pointillism and to halftone, but the distribution is the difference. Halftone puts one dot per cell on a rigid grid and varies its size; stippling scatters dots more organically, so the pattern never reads as a screen. This effect drives that with a jittered lattice, dialling from a clean regular stipple all the way to the clustered, cracked-emulsion look of a reticulated print.
What shapes the result is the tone response and the scatter. A tone curve decides how quickly dots pack in as the image darkens; a distortion control lets each dot wobble off a perfect circle so the field looks inked rather than printed; and the dots can shimmer over time like film grain. Foreground and background are yours, from black ink on paper white to anything you choose.
Signature looks
Pen and ink
Fine black dots on paper white, evenly scattered, tone built purely from density. A naturalist’s field illustration.
Reticulated print
Dots clustered and cracked into an organic, emulsion-like grain. The look of a photo screen-printed with too much texture.
Ink shimmer
The field rehashing frame to frame so the dots crawl, a living stipple that reads as animated grain over the subject.
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 stipple effect?
It reproduces an image using only dots, varying how densely and how large they are placed so that dark regions fill with dots and light regions thin out. The eye averages the dots back into smooth tone, the same way a pen-and-ink stippled drawing works.
What is the difference between stippling and pointillism?
Stippling uses dots of a single ink colour and builds tone from their density. Pointillism uses dots of different colours placed so they blend into new colours at a distance. Stippling is about value; pointillism is about colour mixing.
What is the difference between stipple and halftone?
Halftone places one dot per cell on a regular grid and changes the dot size to carry tone, so it reads as a mechanical screen. Stippling scatters dots more freely, so the pattern looks hand-drawn or etched rather than printed by a machine.
Can I apply a stipple effect to video?
Yes. The dot field is regenerated each frame, so it tracks the moving image and can be set to shimmer like grain. Modulate runs the stipple effect on images and video in real time in your browser.
How do I get the classic ink-on-paper look?
Keep the dots dark on a light background and let density, not dot softness, carry the shading. A little distortion knocks the dots off perfect circles so the result reads as ink rather than a printed screen.
Related effects
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.
ASCII art effect
Rebuilds the image out of text characters, matching brighter and darker glyphs to the light and dark areas underneath.
Pattern Grid effect
Stamps a grid of small icons over the image, choosing or scaling each one by the brightness underneath.