Duotone Effect

Create the bold two-colour look used on posters, album covers and brand campaigns. The brightness of every pixel is mapped onto a gradient between your shadow colour and your highlight colour, so the dark parts of the photo take one colour and the bright parts the other. Choose a preset or your own brand colours.

Image Editing Runs in your browser

Create a Duotone Image

JavaScript is required. This tool runs in your browser, so please enable JavaScript to use it. The instructions below are still available.

Image

Drag and drop your image (JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or BMP) here, or click to browseAccepted: JPG, JPEG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, AVIF. Up to 40 MB.

Colour preset

Shadow colour

Highlight colour

Contrast

Strength

Output format

Quality Used for JPEG and WebP. Higher means a larger file.

Background colourFills transparent areas when the result is saved as JPEG.

How to Use the Duotone Effect

Add your picture.
Choose a preset, or pick your own shadow and highlight colours.
Adjust contrast for punch and strength to blend with the original colours.
Press Apply duotone and download.

About This Tool

Designers producing on-brand imagery, marketers creating eye-catching social graphics, and musicians or event organisers making covers and posters.

Input: JPG / PNG / WebP / GIF / BMP · Output: PNG / JPG / WebP.

Features and Limitations

Features

Eight ready-made colour pairs plus custom colours.
Contrast control applied before the colour mapping.
Strength slider to blend the duotone with the original.
Transparency preserved; live preview.

Limitations

Exactly two colours are used; tritone and multi-stop gradients are not supported.
Photos with little tonal range produce flat results; raise the contrast to compensate.
Processing happens on your device, so very large files depend on your browser's available memory.

Example

With navy #1D2B64 and pink #F8CDDA, black pixels become navy, white pixels become pink and, with contrast at 0, a mid-grey becomes the halfway colour, about #8B7C9F.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is a duotone different from a colour tint?

A tint adds one colour over the picture. A duotone replaces all colour with a gradient between two colours based on brightness, so shadows and highlights get different hues.

Which colours work best?

Pick a dark, saturated shadow colour and a light highlight colour. Strong contrast between the two gives the most graphic result.

Can I use my exact brand colours?

Yes. Choose “Custom colours” or simply change the two colour fields; any preset is overridden when you edit them.

Is my photo uploaded?

No, everything runs in your browser.