The latest effects, tools, and improvements in Modulate.
No account. Just open it and make.
Modulate now opens straight into the full editor: every effect, every layer type, your own images and video, no signup. Your media stays on your machine until you save, and signing up turns the session into your first project.
Turn any image into a pixel poster.
Shadows, midtones, and highlights each become flat pixel blocks on their own grid, with a color and an outline per band. A photo goes in, a screen-print style poster comes out, and it runs live on video too.
Put star-filter glints on every highlight.
The cross-screen lens filter, live on video: bright points sprout thin rays that fade along their length, with a hot glowing core. Built in linear light like Glow, so the rays read as light instead of haze.
The editor's effects, free in your browser.
Eight free tools built on the same GPU engine as the full editor, so the results are identical to what you get inside Modulate. Everything runs on your machine and your media never uploads anywhere.
Break your video the way codecs do.
True block-matching motion estimation, the same mechanics real compression corruption comes from. Motion drags the image apart, holds it, and heals back to clean video on your terms.
Melt the image into sorted streaks.
A true GPU compute sort, not an approximation: full-length contiguous spans, sorted in realtime, even at high resolution.
Trails that survive a frame-rate change.
Duration is now set in seconds instead of frames, so a two-second smear means two seconds at any frame rate. Existing projects keep working exactly as they were.
Drop icons straight onto the canvas.
Search thousands of icons, powered by the Noun Project. Icons arrive as real layers, so you can recolor them, animate them, mask with them, and run any effect over them.
Grain that behaves like film stock.
Reworked film grain with a more organic response curve. Grain now sits inside the image the way film does instead of reading as noise laid on top.
Deeper, more physical 3D surfaces.
A materials pass across 3D layers, from surfaces to lighting to extrusion.
Start from a look, make it yours.
Every template opens fully editable: the layers, effects, and animation are all there to pull apart, restyle, and remix into your own project. Also the quickest way to learn how a look is built.
Sign-ups are open to everyone.
Modulate moves from closed beta to open beta: no more invites. Pick a plan and start making.
Bend any layer through a lens.
Bulge, pinch, and lens-distort around a draggable center point. Keep it gentle for subtle lens character, or push it hard for full fisheye.
Tame a messy project list.
Sort your projects, and select several at once to delete or restore in bulk. Cleaning up after a heavy experimenting session takes seconds instead of a click per project.
Your type, in every look.
Upload your own font files and use them in text layers alongside Google Fonts. Your fonts get the same shaping, animation, and effects treatment as everything else, so brand type slots straight into any look.
Vacuum-seal your layer in plastic film.
Moulds a glossy film over the image, embossed with real highlights and self-shadowing. Tighten it down and the film pulls into the contours like actual packaging.
Give every pixel its own moment in time.
A gradient or control map decides how far back each part of the image reaches, melting footage across recent frames. The experimental-film classic, live and tweakable.
Motion that leaves a trail.
A decaying trail of recent frames follows anything that moves. Dial it short for a subtle motion smear or long for ghostly light-painting trails.
Generate living, evolving texture.
An evolving procedural field as a layer. Use it as a backdrop, texture under type, or raw material for other effects to chew on; pair it with Displacement Map and the whole canvas comes alive.
Outline anything, properly.
Outlines that trace the actual silhouette, so text, cutouts, and odd shapes get real contour lines rather than a box.
Warp one layer with another.
Bright and dark areas of a map layer push the pixels around, which covers everything from heat haze and frosted glass to full melts. Point it at a moving layer and the distortion comes alive.
Full-resolution renders, up to 4096 x 2160.
Video export now goes up to 4K H.264, with every effect rendering at full resolution. Big enough for delivery, not just previews.
Put the edge back into soft footage.
Crisp up soft sources and give renders extra bite, without the telltale glow of overdone sharpening.
Move the footage, keep the keyframes.
Slide a layer's content in time without moving its keyframes, or shift both together. Lining up a specific video moment against your animation no longer means rebuilding the keyframes around it.
Track an object, pin any effect to it.
Motion tracking now hosts full effect chains: attach effects to a tracked region and they follow the subject through the shot. Blur a face, glitch a passing car, pin a glow to a dancer.
Drop GIFs straight onto the canvas.
Animated GIFs import like any other media. The frames play on the timeline and take effects exactly like video, so found footage and reaction loops go straight into a composition.
Collapse gradients into hard steps.
Reduce colors to flat bands for print, screen-burn, and scanner looks. A great partner for Dither and Halftone.
Branch a project before the risky move.
Fork your current state into a fresh project without losing the original. Keep both versions and come back to whichever won.
The pixel look, with real control.
Rebuild the image as a grid of solid blocks, with enough control to feel designed rather than defaulted.
Turn footage into a hand-made sprite.
Redraw anything at a tiny resolution with a retro palette, ordered dithering, and optional dark outlines. Console-era looks, live on video.
Tile the image like real inlay.
Shaped cells with grout spacing and tone-driven tile sizing keep it reading like craft rather than a filter. Beautiful on portraits and architectural shots.
Pixels that know where the detail is.
Blocks split where the image needs them: faces and edges stay crisp while flat areas go chunky. The quadtree look straight out of generative art, re-solving itself in realtime as the video moves.
Sand patterns from a vibrating plate.
Grains gather along the nodal lines of a standing wave, exactly like the physics-demo videos. Sweep the frequency and the pattern snaps from one resonance to the next.
Instant sci-fi HUD texture.
A packed sheet of small technical graphics: data readouts, dials, codes, barcodes, and markers on an aligned grid. Everything on the sheet animates.
An editor for both bright and dark rooms.
A full light theme and a toggle to match your system. Every panel, control, and surface got the sweep, so neither mode feels like an afterthought.
Fold the canvas into symmetry.
Reflect and tile the image with draggable on-canvas handles, from a single clean mirror line to full kaleidoscope segmentation.
Real imagery, zero round-trips.
Search Pexels stock photos from the add media dialog and drop them straight onto the canvas. Ideal for quickly testing a look against real imagery.
Turn tone into topographic lines.
Luminance traced into clean line work, like elevation lines on a map following the tones of your image. Crisp, plotter-style output that moves with video.
The riso print look, separated into real inks.
Tone separates into ink channels and composites back like an actual risograph pass. Zine energy, no drum cylinder required.
Structure as a layer.
Animated grids and guides you can put under type, over footage, or behind a whole composition. Layer it in and everything suddenly looks intentional.
Give pixels a paper history.
Crumple, fold, and texture layers like printed paper, with real scanned stocks or a synthesized mode when you need fiber and tooth without sourcing a scan.
Any layer can be a mask.
Text, shapes, images, anything: a layer can now mask the layers beneath it. Type carrying video inside it is one checkbox away, and animated masks open up reveal after reveal.
Make the bright parts bloom.
Soft halos around bright areas, like lights through a hazy lens. Scales from a subtle sheen on highlights to full neon signage.
Put motion into anything.
Moving distortion in three flavors: swirling turbulence, rolling directional waves, or rings spreading from a point. One of the quickest ways to make a still feel alive.
Two colors, total control.
A hard cutoff between light and dark, the foundation of xerox, screen-print, and high-contrast zine looks. Pairs beautifully with Riso and Halftone.
Streak the frame in one direction.
Motion blur from a pan that never happened. Animate the angle and length and still footage starts to move; great for speed, better for abstraction.
Aim the energy at a point.
Smear the image around a center: a zoom rush, a spin, or both at once. Instant intensity for beat drops and impact frames.
Bokeh, not mush.
Blur like a real camera lens: out-of-focus highlights bloom into shaped bokeh instead of washing out to grey. Depth and atmosphere for flat digital sources.
Miniaturize the real world.
A strip of focus with everything else falling away, the trick that makes real scenes look like miniatures. The focus band sits wherever you put it, so it doubles as a general cinematic focus pull.
Stutter the motion on purpose.
Drops the frame rate of everything beneath it, so motion plays back as a stop-motion stutter. Classic music-video and animation hold-frame energy from a single Frame Rate control.
The grade starts here.
Precise tone and color control: drag points on a curve to brighten, darken, or add contrast, overall or per channel. The fastest route to a signature color feel.
Ink dots that follow the light.
The image redrawn as a field of ink dots, large and dense in shadow, small and sparse in light. The classic engraving and newsprint look, live on video. Gorgeous on faces.
Recolor by brightness.
Luminance remapped to any color ramp: shadows take one end, highlights the other. The fastest route to duotone, thermal, and infrared looks, and the backbone of a hundred album covers.
Split the channels like a bad lens.
Red, green, and blue drift apart so edges fringe with color. Keep it low for analog authenticity or push it past realism into full glitch fringing.
Melt the image into liquid blobs.
Rounded blobs that flow and merge like drops of ink. Silhouettes stay pixel-crisp while the shapes gloop together, so the result reads graphic rather than blurry. Mesmerizing on type.
Refraction through real flutes.
Ribbed glass that bends and repeats the image like a textured shower door, refracted with a real index-of-refraction model rather than a smear.
Type that bounces like the screensaver.
A line of text in constant motion around the canvas, with trailing echoes if you want them. Nostalgic, hypnotic, and surprisingly useful for lockups and loops.
Squeeze the frame through curved glass.
The image pulls toward the center while a stretched, magnified band wraps the edges. A strong frame for type and product shots, and an easy way to make a static image feel dimensional.
Halftone with icons instead of dots.
A grid of small glyphs over the image, each one chosen or scaled by the brightness underneath. Swap the glyphs and the same footage becomes a totally different poster.
Broadcast decay, modeled from the signal.
Analog TV artifacts built from how the signal path actually degrades, not noise pasted on top, so the smear and static move like a real tube TV.
Redraw the frame in type.
Live text characters, with brightness picking each glyph. The terminal-art classic, running in realtime on video.
Modulate leaves alpha.
Modulate moves out of alpha and into closed beta, invite only. The founding set of effects: CRT Monitor, Dither, Halftone, Hue Shift, Invert, Levels, Vignette, Gaussian Blur, Grain, VHS Pro, FM Modulation, and object Tracking. A real-time effects editor, in your browser.
