Map your media onto a four-color gradient by brightness: duotones, cinematic grades, and contour bands, live on images and video.
How to use it
- Open the editor from this page — it loads a demo photo with the grade already applied — then drop in your own image or video.
- Pick the four colors of the gradient: shadows, dark midtones, light midtones, highlights.
- Blend with intensity, flip the mapping, or repeat the gradient for banded looks, then export.
What the gradient map tool does
A gradient map reads one thing from your media, brightness, and replaces every color with the gradient color at the matching position: the darkest pixels take the shadow color, the brightest take the highlight color, and everything between lands proportionally along the ramp. This tool blends between neighboring stops in the OKLab color space, so ramps stay perceptually smooth instead of dipping through gray, and the mapping runs live on video, holding one consistent grade across every frame.
The repeat control tiles the gradient across the tonal range, slicing smooth ramps into bands of color like a topographic map, and ping-pong mirrors each repetition so the bands join without a seam. The same effect ships in the Modulate editor with a visual gradient editor, up to eight freely positioned stops, and keyframeable colors, and it stacks with posterize, halftone, and the rest of the library.
Common questions
Is the gradient map tool free?
Yes. This page opens the full Modulate editor, free with no signup, with the effect already set up. Anonymous exports run up to 5 seconds at 1080px with a small watermark; a free account exports watermark-free at higher caps, and Pro raises them further.
What do the four colors control?
Each color owns a band of brightness: shadows at the dark end, highlights at the bright end, and two midtone stops between, with smooth blends across the boundaries. Brightness alone decides which color a pixel gets; the original hue is discarded.
Can I gradient map a video?
Yes. Drop in an MP4, WebM, or MOV and every frame passes through the same mapping, so the grade never wavers across motion. Most gradient map tools online are image-only.
Can I use more than four colors?
Yes. The page opens the editor with a designed four-stop grade, and the visual gradient editor takes it from there: up to eight stops, free positioning, an input range control, and keyframes on every stop.
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. The mapping runs in your browser on your GPU. Your media stays on your computer.
Go deeper
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.
There's more where this came from
The full editor lets you use every effect together, over video, text, 3D, and shapes. Free, no signup, nothing to install — it opens with this effect already set up.
Open the editor