What it does
Splits the image into shadows, midtones, and highlights, and redraws each band as flat pixel blocks on its own offset grid with custom fill and outline colors, like a layered screen-print poster.
The look borrows its logic from screen printing. A print shop reducing a photograph to three inks separates it by tone first: one screen for the darks, one for the mids, one for the lights, each laid down as a flat spot color. Posterization is that separation done digitally, and it is where this effect starts. But where posterize flattens the tones and stops, tone pixelate throws away the photographic detail entirely and rebuilds each separation out of blocks.
The blocks are what make it read as designed rather than filtered. Each tonal layer is rasterized at its own resolution, so a coarse midtone grid sits against fine highlight blocks, edges stagger, and corners never quite meet. One shared grid would collapse the layers back into a single pixelated posterize; three mismatched grids keep them legibly separate, the way misregistered print layers stay separate. The outlines finish the job, tracing each band’s blocky silhouette like a printmaker’s keyline and pulling every region off the one beneath it.
The craft is mostly in the thresholds. Where the cutoffs sit decides which shapes survive the translation: nudge one and a face’s shadow side swallows its features, nudge it back and they return as a scatter of blocks. The background is its own decision. Keep it solid and the result is a finished poster; fade it out and the blocks hover over the untouched image underneath, a graphic annotation of the footage’s own light. On video the separation runs on every frame, so the bands crawl and re-tile as the light moves.
Signature looks
Gig poster
Three loud inks on a near-black ground, chunky mismatched blocks, hairline outlines. The screen-print flyer, generated from a photograph’s light.
Cut paper
Soft adjacent pastels with heavy dark outlines, bands reading as sheets of paper cut to blocky contours and layered on top of each other.
Ghost overlay
The backdrop faded away so the blocks float over the original footage beneath, tone made visible as a floating diagram of the image.
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 the tone pixelate effect?
It is a pixelation that separates before it pixelates: the image is split into shadows, midtones, and highlights, and each band is redrawn as flat-colored pixel blocks on its own grid with its own outline. The result reads as a designed three-color print rather than a censored photo, because no photographic color survives the translation.
What is the difference between tone pixelate and posterize?
Posterize flattens an image’s tones into a few levels but keeps its detail at full resolution, so the output is still recognizably the photograph. Tone pixelate performs the same tonal separation and then rebuilds each band out of blocks in colors you choose, so the output is a new graphic drawn from the image’s light rather than a simplified copy of it.
Why does each tonal band use a different pixel size?
Because identical grids would fuse the bands back into one pixelated image. When the shadows, midtones, and highlights are rasterized at different block sizes, their edges stagger and interlock instead of aligning, which is what makes the layers read as separate printed sheets. It is the digital cousin of misregistration in screen printing, put to work on purpose.
How do you make a pixelated poster from a photo?
Start from tone, not color: split the image into a few brightness bands, assign each band a flat ink-like color, and rebuild the bands at a chunky resolution with outlines. In Modulate, the Tone Pixelate effect does the whole chain live in the editor, on photos and video, and the thresholds and per-band colors stay adjustable the entire time.
Does the tone pixelate effect work on video?
Yes. The tonal separation re-runs on every frame, so as light moves through the shot the bands crawl, re-tile, and trade blocks along their boundaries. Motion reads as blocky regions negotiating their borders, which suits title sequences and loop posts especially well, and the effect stacks with grain, halftone, and color tools in the editor.
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.
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.
Posterize effect
Collapses smooth gradients into a few flat tonal bands for a screen-printed, cel-shaded look. Band per channel or by brightness, with a gamma bias to push the steps toward shadows or highlights.
Threshold effect
Reduces the image to two colors with a hard cutoff between light and dark, with optional outlined edges.