Filter FX

Adobe Express add-on. Page copy in the house format, with one structural addition — vector output gets its own section, because it is the thing that sets this build apart and nothing else in the layout carries it.

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

Now with editable vector output.

Free until 31 August 2026.

Filter FX turns any photo or graphic into print-inspired, retro, and graphic art directly on your Adobe Express 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 – as a picture, or as real editable shapes you can recolour on the page. Everything runs in your browser – no accounts, no uploads to third-party servers, nothing to install.

Intro and tutorial video

Key Features

Pixel or vector, same effects

Every effect renders as a picture. Four of them – halftone, pixelate, clamp, and text characters – can also be placed as real vector shapes. Marks sharing a colour merge into one path, so the palette you choose is the object count: a monochrome halftone screen arrives as a single editable shape, not four thousand dots. Recolour it, rescale it, pull it apart, treat it like anything else you drew in Express.

Noise and glow stay picture-only, and the panel says so rather than offering something it can't deliver – one is random per pixel, the other a continuous gradient, and neither can be drawn as shapes honestly.

Six 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. The radial patterns have a movable origin, so a sunburst can come from the corner or from off the page entirely. Control size, density, contrast, and angle. Flip figure and ground with invert, switch to single-colour marks for ink-on-paper looks, or knock the background out to transparent.

Pixelate – five tile geometries: squares, hexagons, bricks, interlocking triangles, and isometric diamonds with independent width and height for anamorphic looks. Add tile spacing in a colour of your choice or as 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-colour or single-colour glyphs, and transparent backgrounds. The letterforms ship with the add-on rather than borrowing whatever font your machine happens to have, so the same file looks the same everywhere – and it's what lets the effect place real shapes rather than a picture of type.

Clamp – hard two-tone silhouettes through to layered paper cut-outs. Keep posterised image colours or map tones to an ink ramp, cut the brightest step to transparency for instant stickers and stencils, and control how roughly each layer is cut – higher simplicity gives you straighter, torn-paper edges.

Noise and grain – soft photographic film grain that lives in the midtones and protects your shadows and highlights, hard per-channel colour noise for a sharper edge, and scanlines for display looks. Deterministic grain means your export always matches your preview.

Glow and split – RGB channel separation with an independent direction and distance per channel, plus bloom. Chromatic aberration, VHS misregistration, and print misalignment from one control.

Start from a look

Twenty-six presets, and each mode has its own set. Pixel mode offers fourteen – Newspaper, Comic rays, Vortex, Mono film, Old TV, Retro game and more. Vector mode offers twelve built for what vector is good at – Newsprint, Riso print, Paper cut, Screen print, Stencil, Isometric, Dot matrix.

Every thumbnail is rendered through the pipeline it belongs to, so what you see on the tile is what lands on your page. Save your own settings and reapply them across as many images as you like; saved looks remember which mode they were made in. They're stored in your browser on that device, so they don't travel between machines.

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.

Make it move

Capture a start look and an end look, and Filter FX tweens between them – linear, or easing out of the start and into the end. Add motion a tween can't express: a lattice that drifts a whole number of cells, a halftone screen that turns a whole number of turns, or grain that regenerates every frame. Set in whole units, each one ends exactly where it began, so it repeats without a seam.

Export as MP4 or GIF, with a size estimate measured from your actual frames before you commit.

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.
Choose Pixel or Vector.
Add to document.