What is a duotone?

A duotone is an image made of two colors: one for the shadows and one for the highlights, with every tone in between mixing the two. It started as a printing technique with two inks. Designers use it for posters, album covers, and social media graphics, where it ties photos to a brand's colors and turns busy pictures into calm, bold ones.

Tool description

Open an image, then pick a shadow color and a highlight color, or start from one of the presets. The dark parts of the image take the shadow color, the light parts the highlight color, and the midtones a mix of both. The preview updates as you change the colors, and the compare button shows the original next to the result. Download it as PNG, JPG, or WebP.

Features

  • Any two colors for the shadows and the highlights
  • Classic color pairs as presets to start from
  • Transparent areas stay transparent, processed in your browser

How it works

The tool first turns every pixel into its perceived brightness, the same gray a good black and white conversion gives. That gray picks a color on a straight gradient from the shadow color, for black, to the highlight color, for white. With black and white as the two colors, the result is a plain grayscale image.

Tips

  • Pair a dark shadow color with a light highlight color. The bigger the difference in brightness, the more contrast the result keeps.
  • Swap the two colors for an inverted duotone, with light shadows and dark highlights.
  • Photos with low contrast look flat as duotones. Raise the contrast first if the result looks muddy.