Duotone Effect
Map a photo onto two colours โ the poster look, with presets.
About this tool
Shadows become one colour, highlights the other, everything between blends โ six curated presets or any pair you pick. Full-resolution processing on your device, PNG export, no account.
A century of two-ink style
Duotone is older than it looks: print shops ran two-ink jobs for a century because a second ink was vastly cheaper than four-colour process, and designers discovered the constraint FLATTERED photographs โ reduced to pure tone-on-a-ramp, images become graphic, unified, poster-like. Spotify's 2015 rebrand made the look a household style, and it remains the fastest way to make mixed photography feel like one deliberate system (the trick: same colour pair across every image). What makes a pair work: strong LUMINANCE contrast between the two colours โ dark shadows, bright highlights โ because the photo's detail now lives entirely in that ramp; two mid-brightness colours produce mud regardless of hue. Flat photos make flat duotones, so a contrast boost in photo filters first pays off. The mapping uses proper photometric luminance (as the grayscale tool explains), so tonal balance survives the paint job. The palette extractor can pull a colour pair from a brand image; Hex colour codes, explained decodes the colour values themselves.
Frequently asked questions
Which colour pairs work best?
Pairs with strong brightness contrast โ dark-plus-bright is the rule (navy/amber, black/cream). Two mid-tone colours make mud, whatever the hues, because all detail lives in the light-to-dark ramp.
Why does my duotone look flat?
The source photo is low-contrast โ duotone can only remap the tones it's given. Boost contrast in photo filters first and the duotone snaps into life.
How do I match a brand colour?
Set the shadow colour to the brand's dark tone and pick a pale complement for highlights โ or extract both from a brand image with the palette tool and paste the hex codes.
Is this the same as a colour filter?
No โ a filter tints an image; duotone discards the original colour entirely and rebuilds the image from luminance alone, mapped onto your two colours. That's why it unifies mismatched photos so well.