Filter FX

One image, endless treatments – halftone, grain, pixel, text, and stencil effects inside Canva.

Filter FX turns any photo or graphic into print-inspired, retro, and graphic art directly on your Canva design. Import an image from your page or upload one, pick an effect, tune it live, and drop the result straight back into your design. Everything runs in your browser – no accounts, no uploads to third-party servers, nothing to install.

Intro and tutorial video

Key Features

Five effects, deeply adjustable

Halftone – ten pattern geometries, from classic print dots, lines, squares, diamonds, and rings to waves, chevrons, and the radial family: concentric, rays, and spiral. Control size, density, contrast, and angle. Flip figure and ground with invert, switch to single-color marks for ink-on-paper looks, or knock the background out to transparent.

Noise and grain – soft photographic film grain that lives in the midtones and protects your shadows and highlights, hard per-channel color noise for a sharper edge, and scanlines for display looks. Deterministic grain means your export always matches your preview, and Shuffle regenerates the pattern when you want a different plate.

Pixelate – square, hexagon, and brick tile grids with independent tile width and height for stretched, anamorphic looks. Add tile spacing with a color of your choice or a transparent cutout, and limit the palette for retro game and mosaic styles.

Text characters – rebuild your image from type. Three character sets, adjustable cell size, image-color or single-color glyphs, and transparent backgrounds.

Clamp – hard two-tone silhouettes through to multi-step poster looks. Keep posterized image colors or map tones to an ink ramp, and cut the brightest step to transparency for instant stickers and stencils.

Start from a look

Fourteen featured presets – Newspaper, Pop art, Comic rays, Vortex, Mono film, Retro game, Honeycomb, Stencil, and more – each shown as a live thumbnail so you can see the treatment before you commit. Save your own settings during a session and reapply them 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 black and white converter. Crush a flat photo into punchy halftone territory, or convert to mono and lay film grain over the top – the classic darkroom move, one slider each.

How it works

Select an image on your design and choose Use selected image, or upload a file.
Pick a preset or an effect, and tune it with live preview.
Add to design, or save to your Canva media library.

Common Issues

Base image seems to vanish: the blend layer is covering it at full opacity in Normal mode; pick a blend mode or lower the opacity
Cut out does nothing: both images are fully opaque; switch Cut using to Brightness
Mask has no visible effect: check the Applies to setting matches the layer you expect it to carve