ADOBE EXPRESS
Express has plenty of AI in it, but no real image-treatment effects – no halftone, no proper grain, no pixel art, no stencil looks. So the moment a design wants a print-inspired or retro treatment, you hit the ceiling. Filter FX turns any photo or graphic into halftone, grain, pixel, text, and stencil art right on your page – and drops it back as a picture, or as real editable vector shapes. No AI, no uploads, nothing leaves your browser.
Live preview
PREVIEW
Pick an effect, tune it live, watch your image become something else entirely. Then choose: place it as a picture, or as editable shapes you can recolor on the page. A halftone screen comes back as one clean shape, not four thousand dots.
Key features
Pixel or vector, same effects
Every effect renders as a picture. Four – halftone, pixelate, clamp, and text characters – can also place as real vector shapes. Marks sharing a color merge into one path, so a monochrome halftone arrives as a single editable shape, not thousands of dots. Recolor it, rescale it, pull it apart, treat it like anything you drew in Express. (Noise and glow stay picture-only – and the panel tells you so, rather than pretending otherwise.)
Six effects, deeply adjustable
Halftone – ten pattern geometries (dots, lines, squares, diamonds, rings, waves, chevrons, and the radial family: concentric, rays, spiral) with a movable origin, plus size, density, contrast, and angle. Pixelate – five tile shapes including hexagons, bricks, and anamorphic isometric diamonds, with spacing and palette limits for retro-game looks. Text characters – rebuild your image from type, with fonts that ship with the app so it looks the same everywhere. Clamp – two-tone silhouettes through to torn-paper cut-outs and instant stencils. Noise and grain – film grain that protects your shadows and highlights, plus scanlines. Glow and split – RGB channel separation, chromatic aberration, VHS misregistration.
Start from a look
Twenty-six presets, each mode with its own set – Newspaper, Comic rays, Old TV, Retro game for pixel; Newsprint, Riso, Paper cut, Screen print, Stencil for vector. Every thumbnail is rendered through the real pipeline, so the tile is what you'll get. Save your own and reapply across as many images as you like.
Shape the image first
A shared adjustments stage runs before every effect: brightness, contrast, black and white points, and a mono converter. Crush a flat photo into punchy halftone, or convert to mono and lay grain over the top – the classic darkroom move, one slider each.
Make it move
Capture a start and an end and Filter FX tweens between them – plus motion a tween can't fake: a lattice drifting a whole number of cells, a halftone screen turning a whole number of turns, grain regenerating every frame. Set in whole units, each loops without a seam. Export MP4 or GIF, with a size estimate from your real frames before you commit.
TUTORIAL