Instagram-Style Photo Filters

One tap filters are the quickest way to give photos a consistent mood: bright and punchy, warm and faded, black and white, or the flash-and-grain look of a disposable camera. This tool offers more than twenty Instagram-style looks plus vintage, film, Y2K digicam and duotone, each with a strength slider. The filters are exact colour-matrix and blend-mode recipes calculated in JavaScript, so a photo looks the same in every browser, and nothing is uploaded.

How to use this tool

1. Choose one or more photos.
2. Pick a filter; for duotone, also pick the shadow and highlight colours.
3. Lower the strength if the effect is too strong (100% is the full recipe, 0% the original).
4. Optionally add an orange date stamp, then download the photos.

Formula

result = original + strength × (filtered − original)

Each filter is a chain of steps: brightness, contrast, saturate, sepia, grayscale and hue-rotate use the colour matrices of the W3C Filter Effects specification, clamped after each step. Colour layers are then mixed in with W3C blend modes (overlay, soft-light, screen, multiply, color-dodge and others) at their own opacity, some through radial gradients. Some looks add faded blacks, a vignette or grain (a fixed pattern, so results repeat). Duotone maps the Rec. 709 luma of each pixel onto a gradient between your two colours.

Example

Clarendon on a pure blue pixel (37, 99, 235): contrast × 1.2 gives (19, 93, 255); saturate × 1.35 pushes red below zero and blue above the maximum, giving (0, 95, 255); a light blue overlay layer at 20% then lifts green to about 104. The result, (0, 104, 255), is brighter and more saturated. At 50% strength the pixel ends halfway between the original and the full filter: (18, 101, 245).