How these filters work, and why the preview can be trusted
There are 32 filters here, in six groups: Y2K and retro digital, punchy, mood, film, black and white, and special effects. Every one of them has a strength slider, and every one can be applied to a single photo or to a queue of several hundred.
Pick by what the photo is for
The groups are ordered roughly by how far they move an image from what the camera saw.
Punchy filters — Vivid, Punch, Crisp — do what most people actually want when they say a photo looks flat. They raise contrast and saturation without changing the colour of anything. These are the safe choices for product shots, listings and anything where the subject needs to look like itself.
Mood filters shift the white balance rather than the intensity. Warm and Golden push towards amber, Cool and Dusk towards blue, Mint towards green. This is the group to reach for when several photos were taken under different lighting and need to look like a set.
Film emulates the failure modes of analogue stock: Polaroid’s lifted blacks and warm cast, Lomo’s heavy vignette and crushed contrast, the washed-out Faded look. These read as deliberate rather than accidental, which is why they still get used forty years after the film stopped being manufactured.
Y2K and retro digital — Y2K, Vaporwave, Cyber, Bubblegum, Chrome — push saturation past what a camera would record and shift hues towards magenta and cyan. The reference is early-2000s digital: over-sharpened, over-saturated, slightly wrong.
Black and white removes the colour decision entirely. Noir for high contrast and a dark vignette, Silver for a gentler tonal range, Ink for something close to a photocopy.
Special effects are the ones that stop pretending to be photography. Negative inverts every channel. X-Ray inverts a monochrome image and lights it cyan. Blueprint keeps only the brightness of the original and replaces the colour outright. Toxic, Acid, Psycho and Thermal push hue rotation and difference blending far enough that the result is unpredictable — which is the point.
Strength is the more useful control
A filter at 100% is a starting position, not an answer. Most of these were tuned to be clearly visible at full strength, which for real photographs is often too much. Somewhere between 30% and 60% is where a filter stops announcing itself and starts just making the picture better.
The slider is genuinely continuous: at 0% the underlying maths collapses to the identity transform and the exported file is the original, unchanged. There is no quality cost to running an image through a filter set to zero.
The order things happen in
Filters are applied after rotation, cropping and resizing, and before encoding. That order matters for two reasons. The colour transform runs over the output-sized image rather than the full-resolution original, so filtering a 50-megapixel photo down to 1600 px costs the same as filtering a photo that was already 1600 px. And because encoding comes last, the file is compressed exactly once, with the filter already baked in — no double compression.
What it does to file size
A filter changes how compressible an image is. Pushing contrast and saturation up creates more local detail for the encoder to preserve, which makes files larger — a Deep Fry or Lomo export can land 20–40% above the unfiltered version at the same quality setting. Desaturating does the reverse; the black-and-white filters usually produce the smallest files in the set.
The size estimate in the panel is measured by encoding a small sample with your actual settings, filter included, so the figure already reflects whichever direction your filter pushes things.