Apply Duotone Effects in One Click
Map shadows to one color and highlights to another for that on-trend two-tone aesthetic. Ten curated presets plus full custom control. Live preview as you tweak.
Describe the edit — the AI assistant does it on the canvas.
Map shadows and highlights to two brand colors.
10 Built-In Duotone Presets
Each preset maps shadow and highlight to a curated color pair — use as-is or dial in your own.
Spotify
Sunset
Cyberpunk
Mono Noir
Rose Gold
Ocean
Forest
Plasma
Sepia
Midnight
The Two-Color Effect Explained
How Duotone Works
A gradient map runs across every pixel's brightness — shadows take one color, highlights take another. The result is the bold, editorial two-tone look made famous by Spotify playlist covers.
10 Presets + Custom Colors
Start from Spotify, Cyberpunk, Sunset, Mono Noir, and six more curated pairs. Or pick any shadow and highlight hex codes yourself. The canvas previews every change live.
Transparency Preserved
Duotone only colors visible pixels. Logos and PNGs with transparent backgrounds keep their alpha channel intact after export — ready for any context.
Shadow vs Highlight Roles
The shadow color fills dark areas and dominates large flat shapes. The highlight color defines bright tones and surface detail. Which one you want to occupy more visual weight is the practical starting point for choosing a pair.
Works Best On
Black-and-white photography, high-contrast portraits, architectural shots, and any image that looks interesting in greyscale. If the greyscale version is interesting, the duotone will be too.
When to Skip It
Colorful flat illustrations lose their color identity and look muddied. Very low-contrast images with only midtones produce flat results. Run the greyscale test first — dull greyscale means dull duotone.
How to Apply a Duotone Effect
Upload your image
Load a photo or logo onto the canvas.
Open Duotone
Choose the Duotone Generator from the toolbar.
Pick colors
Start from a preset or choose custom shadow and highlight colors.
Download
Export the duotone image in full quality.
Where Duotone Shines
Cover Art
Playlist, podcast, and video covers with mood.
Campaign Visuals
A unified look across an ad or launch set.
Editorial
Striking two-tone imagery for articles and blogs.
Social Posts
Scroll-stopping, on-brand feed graphics.
Duotone Generator — in the editor
The real editor, start to finish — no signup needed to try it yourself.
Free preview · No signup · ~10 seconds
Three Framer plugins — Image Color Changer, AI Logo Generator and Image Background Removal.
See all threeUsed by marketers and founders at
What people use it for
The jobs the editor was built around — and what it does differently on each one.
Colourways you can revisit
Every edit is a layer, not a bake. When the brand shifts, reopen the file and change the colour rather than rebuilding the variant from the original.
Cutouts with awkward edges
AI background removal that keeps hair, foliage and soft shadows instead of stamping a hard outline around them. The output is a transparent PNG, ready to place.
No export, edit, re-import loop
The Framer plugin runs on the canvas you are already working in, so a recolour or a cutout does not mean a round trip through a second application.
Ten options in the time one used to take
Recolour once and step through the alternatives, so a client review can look at the whole range instead of the one version there was time to make.
Brand colours matched exactly
Pick a colour straight off an existing asset and get the hex, rather than eyeballing it against a screenshot and hoping it is close enough.
Free to preview, priced per export
Previewing is unlimited and costs nothing. A credit is spent only when you download a full-resolution file, so exploring an idea is never the expensive part.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about our duotone generator tool
Related Tools
Guides worth reading
How to Make a Duotone Image in Canva (Presets, Custom Hexes, and the Intensity Trap)
Canva's Duotone effect in full — where it hides, how to set custom highlight and shadow colors, why Intensity below 100 stops you hitting a brand hex, and what it does to a logo with a background.
How to Change a Logo Color in Figma (4 Methods, Step by Step)
A complete guide to recoloring a logo in Figma — the Fill row, the Selection colors panel that swaps one hex everywhere at once, the clipped-rectangle trick for placed PNGs, and why the export panel has no WebP.
How to Make a Vector Logo (and When You Actually Need One)
What vector really means, the three honest routes from where you are now, when auto-tracing works, and how to check the result is genuinely vector.
Ready for Duotone Magic?
Ten presets to start from, then set the two colors exactly where you want them. Free to edit and preview.