Use Effects to restyle a photo in one click
Load a photo, pick one of 58 effects, tune its sliders, compare with the original, then download at full size or send it to the Editor as a live layer.
Beginner5 min readUpdated 25 September 2026Effects
On this page
Effects turns a photo into something else with one click: print dots, pixel art, a heat map, a glitch. You will be able to load an image, find an effect, tune it, check it against the original and get it out at full size or into the Editor. It is the fastest route when you want a look, not a layout.
Load a photo
- Go to /effects. The page opens on a drop zone that says Drop an image here.
- Drag a file onto it, or click anywhere in the box to browse.
- The photo appears in the canvas with the effect list beside it (below it on a phone).
PNG, JPG, WebP and GIF are listed on the drop zone, and AVIF, BMP and SVG files are accepted too. The limit is 25 MB per file. If a file is too big or is not an image, a message under the badges tells you why and nothing is loaded.
Your photo is read in the browser. It is never uploaded. See privacy and data for what is and is not sent.
Pick an effect
The Effects section of the side panel holds every effect as a tile with a name and a one-line description. Click a tile and the effect is applied straight away. Original at the top removes the effect.
- Search effects... filters by name and description, so typing "blur" finds Blur, Motion Blur, Radial Blur and Tilt Shift.
- The category tabs narrow the list: All, Artistic, Stylize, Color, Distort and Enhance. Each tab shows how many effects it holds.
- The small line at the bottom of the panel shows which effect is active.
Every effect is explained, setting by setting, in its own article: artistic, stylize, color, distort and enhance.
Tune the settings
Under Parameters you get the sliders for the active effect, with a count of how many there are. Each slider shows its current value, and colour settings show a swatch and hex code. Changes apply live. On heavier effects the canvas shows a quick low-resolution version while you drag and the sharp version a moment after you let go, and the header shows Processing while it works.
Every effect has an Opacity slider as its last setting. It fades the effect back towards your original photo, which is often the quickest way to make a strong effect usable.
Randomise
Effects built on a random pattern (Stipple, Pointillism, Crystallize, Glitch, Slice Shift, Noise, Film Grain and others) have a Randomize slider, called Pattern or Noise Pattern on a few. Each value gives a different but repeatable pattern, so you can scrub through variations and come back to the one you liked by returning to the same number.
Reset, Undo and Clear
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reset | Puts every slider and colour back to its default and picks a new random pattern. The small Reset link above the sliders does the same. |
| Undo | Goes back to the effect you had before, with the settings it had then. It steps through effect changes, not individual slider moves. It keeps the last 30 steps. |
| Clear | Removes the photo and returns to the drop zone. |
Compare with the original
Click Compare above the canvas. A divider appears: the left side is labelled EDITED and the right side ORIGINAL. Drag the round handle to move the split. It works with a mouse, a finger or a pen.
- Left / Right
- Move the divider by 2% (focus the handle first)
- Shift+Left / Shift+Right
- Move the divider by 10%
- Home
- Divider to the left edge
- End
- Divider to the right edge
The zoom controls sit on the right of the same bar: zoom out, zoom in, Fit to view and 1:1 (actual size). Zoom runs from 10% to 400%. The numbers beside them are your photo's real pixel size.
Download
Pick PNG, JPG or WebP in the header (in the bottom bar on a phone). The download is rendered again from your original photo at its own size, up to 8000 px on the long edge, not taken from the preview. Files are named like voidcanvas-halftone-3000x2000.png.
| Format | Use it for |
|---|---|
| PNG | Graphic effects with hard edges (Halftone, Dither, Threshold, Pixelate). No compression artefacts. |
| JPG | Photographic looks (Vintage, Film Grain, Bloom) where a smaller file matters. |
| WebP | Web pages. Smaller than JPG at similar quality. |
Send to the Editor
Open in Editor sends your photo to the Editor with the effect on its own live filter layer above it. The effect stays editable there: you can re-tune it, hide it, mask it or stack more filters. Hold Shift when you click (desktop) to send one flattened image instead. On a phone the button is labelled Editor.
Read filters in the Editor for what you can do with the layer, and moving work between tools for how the handoff works.
On a phone
On a phone or a portrait tablet the canvas sits on top and the effect list and sliders sit underneath in their own scrolling panel. A bar pinned to the bottom of the screen holds Undo, Reset, Clear, Editor and the three download buttons, so they stay within reach of your thumb.
Good to know
- The preview works at up to 1200 px on the long edge. Settings measured in pixels (dot size, block size, blur, shift distance) are scaled up for the download so it looks like the preview, only sharper.
- Dither, Edge Detect, Emboss, Sharpen, Pencil Sketch and Noise work pixel by pixel with no size setting. On a large photo their download is finer grained than the preview.
- Open in Editor sends the photo at the preview size (up to 1200 px on the long edge), so the live filter looks the same on the other side. If you need the full resolution, download instead.
- Sliders are shared between effects. If you set Intensity to 90 on Sepia and then pick Vintage, Vintage starts at 90 too. Press Reset when an effect looks wrong on arrival.
- Hue Shift and Channel Mix start at a visible setting when you pick them, because their neutral values change nothing. Reset puts them back to neutral.
- Only one effect applies at a time here. To stack effects, send the result to the Editor and add more filter layers.