Add a Sepia Effect
Apply a classic sepia tone to a photo and control exactly how strong it is, from a gentle warm tint to a full antique brown. Everything runs locally in your browser.
Privacy-first: every image is processed locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or transmitted to any server.
Where sepia comes from
Sepia was not originally a style. In the nineteenth century prints were toned with a pigment derived from cuttlefish ink, which replaced the silver in the print with a more stable compound — it made photographs last longer, and the warm brown color was the side effect. The look we now associate with old photographs is really an archival technique that outlived its purpose.
The digital version reproduces that color relationship: tones are mapped toward warm browns while their relative lightness is preserved, so the picture keeps its structure and only its palette changes.
Strength is the whole control
At 100% you get the full antique treatment, which suits a deliberately nostalgic piece — a family history page, a title card, a printed keepsake. Much lower values are the more useful secret: 25–40% reads as a subtle warm grade rather than an effect, taking the clinical blue edge off a photo without announcing itself.
Pair it with a small contrast increase so the toned image does not go muddy, and with the vignette slider if you want the darkened edges that old prints tend to have. The Vintage look bundles exactly that combination — partial sepia, reduced saturation, softened contrast and a vignette — as a starting point you can then adjust.
One image or a matching set
Because the settings apply to every image in the list, a whole gallery can be given one consistent tone in a single pass, then exported together as a ZIP. Hold the compare button at any time to see the untouched original. Nothing is uploaded — the toning is computed on your own device.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my image uploaded to adjust it?
- No. Every adjustment is computed on a canvas inside your browser, so the photo never leaves your device and no server ever sees it.
- How do I make an image black and white?
- Set the “Black & white” slider to 100% — or click the B&W look, which also adds a little contrast so the result does not look flat. Noir goes further with a much harder contrast curve.
- What does inverting the colors do?
- It replaces every color with its opposite, which turns a photo into a negative: white becomes black, blue becomes orange. It is how you read a scanned film negative, and a quick way to flip a screenshot to a dark version.
- What is the difference between brightness and contrast?
- Brightness moves every tone up or down together, so the whole picture gets lighter or darker. Contrast pushes light and dark tones apart, which adds punch — or, in the negative direction, flattens the image into a soft, hazy look.
- What does Auto levels do?
- It measures each color channel of your photo, ignores the extreme 0.4% at each end, and stretches what is left across the full range. Washed-out, hazy or underexposed shots usually snap back to life with a single click.
- Can I adjust many photos at once?
- Yes. Drop in as many images as you like — the settings apply to all of them, and you can download the results individually or together as a single ZIP.
- Will adjusting reduce quality?
- The adjustment itself works at full resolution with no downscaling. Only the re-encode matters: choose PNG for a lossless result, or keep JPG/WebP at a high quality setting.