Image Duotone Maker

The Image Duotone Maker recolours any photo so its darkest tones become one colour you choose and its brightest tones become another, with a smooth gradient between them. It is the same striking, two-tone look you see on Spotify playlist covers, album artwork, conference posters and modern brand photography — and here you can apply it to your own pictures in a few seconds, entirely inside your browser. Drop in a portrait, a landscape, a product shot or a screenshot, pick a pair of colours, and watch the whole image re-map in real time as you drag the sliders.

Unlike a simple colour overlay, a true duotone is driven by luminance: every pixel keeps its original light-and-dark structure, but its hue is replaced according to how bright it is. That is what makes the effect feel designed rather than tinted. This tool gives you full control over that mapping — the two anchor colours, the contrast and brightness of the underlying tones, a midtone (gamma) dial, an intensity blend back toward the original, and optional film grain — so you can land anywhere from a bold editorial poster to a gentle cinematic colour wash.

Everything runs 100% client-side. Your photo is read locally, drawn onto a canvas and processed pixel-by-pixel on your own machine; nothing is uploaded and your settings are saved only in this browser. The exported PNG is rendered at the original full resolution of the file you loaded, so it is ready for social posts, slide decks, print or web headers.

How it works

When you load an image it is decoded and drawn onto an off-screen canvas at its native size. For every pixel the tool computes a brightness value using the standard luma weighting (roughly 30% red, 59% green, 11% blue), then looks that brightness up in a 256-entry colour ramp. The ramp is rebuilt whenever you change a control: it starts at your shadow colour for pure black, ends at your highlight colour for pure white, and applies your contrast, brightness, midtone gamma and optional inversion along the way. The intensity slider then blends the duotone result against the original pixel, and grain adds a touch of random noise. Because the heavy work is a precomputed lookup table, even large photos recolour smoothly.

Example

Load a high-contrast portrait, choose a deep navy shadow (#1a1340) and a warm coral highlight (#ff8a5c) — the Indigo Glow preset — and the face takes on a glossy editorial finish. Nudge contrast up to about +20 to separate the subject from the background, lift midtones slightly so skin doesn’t go muddy, then drop intensity to around 80% if you want a hint of the original skin tone to show through. Add 10% grain for a printed look and export. The table below shows a few popular pairings you can reproduce with the presets:

Tap Show original at any time to compare against the untouched photo, hit Reset settings to start over, and use the swap button to flip the shadow and highlight colours instantly. Every figure and pixel stays on your device.