Image Stylize Effects

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What this tool does

Applies five different photo effects directly in your browser: Emboss (a chiseled relief look, in grayscale or full color), Glow (a soft brightened halo), Vignette (darkened, softened edges), Pixelate (a blocky mosaic look), and Censor / Redact (hides a chosen rectangular or elliptical area with pixelation, blur, or a solid color, for hiding faces or license plates).

How It Works

Emboss convolves each pixel with a 3x3 kernel that weighs opposite neighbors against each other, so flat areas collapse to a neutral gray while edges produce a bright or dark ridge; Color Emboss runs this on the raw R/G/B channels, plain Emboss runs it after converting to grayscale. Glow blurs the image with a box blur, brightens that blurred copy, and combines it with the original using a screen blend (result = 255 - (255-a)(255-b)/255), a blend mode that can only brighten. Vignette measures each pixel's distance from the center, scaled independently by the image's half-width and half-height, and smoothly fades the pixel toward a chosen color as that distance passes the Size and Softness thresholds. Pixelate divides the image into fixed-size blocks and replaces every pixel in a block with that block's average color. Censor / Redact applies Pixelate, the same box blur used for Glow, or a solid fill, but only to the pixels inside your dragged rectangle or ellipse, leaving the rest of the photo untouched.

Problems it solves

• Hiding a face, license plate, or other sensitive detail before sharing a photo publicly.
• Adding a soft-focus glow or a darkened vignette border for a more polished, portrait-style photo.
• Creating a stylized, artistic version of a photo, like an embossed relief or a retro pixelated look.

Frequently asked questions