Apply a Duotone Effect to Any Photo
Map shadows and highlights to two colors for a bold, on-brand look. Pick your color pair, preview live, and export a striking duotone image.
Describe the edit — the AI assistant does it on the canvas.
Free preview · No signup · ~10 seconds
Map shadows and highlights to two brand colors — the same gradient map the app applies.
Duotone Presets
Click any flat shade to copy its hex code
A Bold, On-Brand Look in Seconds
What duotone actually does
It's a gradient map, not a color overlay. Every pixel's brightness gets remapped — pure black becomes the shadow color, pure white becomes the highlight, everything in between blends proportionally. That's what gives it depth instead of a flat tint.
Any two colors, live preview
Paste your exact brand hex values or use the color picker. The effect updates live so you can dial in contrast and mood before exporting. No re-uploads, no waiting.
Color pair is everything
High contrast (dark shadow, bright highlight) → bold and graphic, Spotify-style. Low contrast (two similar hues) → flat, avoid it. Best practice: primary color as highlight, near-black or dark complementary as shadow.
Use it as a background layer
Export the duotone image and drop it straight into the Social Banners studio as a background or base layer. Build posts, headers, and ads with a consistent brand treatment across every size.
Common mistakes to avoid
Two mistakes flatten a duotone: picking colors too close in brightness, which erases the light-to-dark range, and starting from a photo that is already low in contrast. Choose a clearly dark shadow and a clearly bright highlight, and begin with an image that has real tonal depth rather than a hazy, evenly-lit one.
How to Make a Duotone Image
Upload your photo
Drag and drop a photo in PNG, JPG, or WebP format.
Select Duotone
Choose the Duotone tool to map the image to two colors.
Pick your two colors
Set a shadow color and a highlight color using the pickers or exact hex codes to match your brand.
Preview and export
Adjust until the contrast looks right, then export your duotone image in high quality.
Apply a Duotone Effect to Any Photo — in the editor
The real editor, start to finish — no signup needed to try it yourself.
Free preview · No signup · ~10 seconds
Where Duotone Shines
Brand Imagery
Unify a photo set with your brand color pair for a cohesive feed.
Campaigns
Give promo visuals a bold, recognizable treatment.
Banner Backgrounds
Create striking backgrounds for posts, headers, and thumbnails.
Presentations
Style slide imagery to match your deck palette.
Used by designers, indie devs & students 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
Related Tools
Guides worth reading
How to Replace a Color in Photoshop (4 Methods, and Why the Edges Go Wrong)
Replace Color, Hue/Saturation on a targeted range, Color Range plus a fill layer, and Selective Color — which to use when, and why a recolored logo keeps a halo of the old color along its edges.
How to Get Your Website Ready for Google WebMCP
A step-by-step guide to exposing WebMCP tools on your site — the imperative and declarative APIs, how to test them, and the real security downsides.
How to Remove a Background in Canva (And What the Free Plan Actually Gives You)
Canva's BG Remover is a paid feature — and so is downloading the result with transparency. Here is what works on a free account, what the two separate paywalls are, and how to get a clean cut-out either way.
Ready for a Duotone Look?
Pick two colors, preview the effect live, and export a bold duotone image in high quality. Start free.