Emboss Effect
Turn a photo, a logo or text into a raised relief lit from one side: grey like stamped metal, or tinted with the picture's own colours.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Turn a photo, a logo or text into a raised relief lit from one side: grey like stamped metal, or tinted with the picture's own colours.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Drop a picture on the page and it turns into an embossed relief - the edges rise toward the light on one side and fall into shadow on the other, and everything flat settles to plain grey, exactly like an image stamped into metal or pressed into paper. Three sliders shape it. Depth sets how far apart the relief is felt, Strength how pronounced it is, and Light angle which way the light comes from, which is what decides whether a shape reads as raised or engraved. The Relief switch chooses between the classic grey stamping and a coloured version that keeps the picture's own colours in the embossed surface. It works on photos, logos, text, line drawings and screenshots.
Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the page, paste one from the clipboard, or pick a file. The embossing effect is applied immediately at a moderate setting: adjust Depth first, because that is what decides whether you get a fine etched texture or a deep, chiselled relief, then Strength for how hard the light hits it. Drag Light angle to move the light around the picture - anything from 90 to 180 degrees gives the familiar top-left lighting that reads as raised, and the opposite side of the dial turns the same image into an engraving. Hold the compare button to see the original. Download as PNG, JPG or WebP, or copy the result to the clipboard.
Almost every emboss filter, including the previous version of this page, uses a three-by-three kernel: it compares each pixel with the one next to it. That was written when pictures were 640 pixels wide. On a 12 megapixel photo, two neighbouring pixels are two samples of the same grain of sensor noise, so the result is a grey sheet with a faint sparkle on it, and it looks completely different in a small preview than it does in the downloaded file.
Here the Depth slider is a fraction of the image's width rather than a fixed number of pixels, and the distance is rescaled for whatever is being drawn. The relief you see on screen is the relief you get in the file, on a phone snapshot and on a 24 megapixel camera file alike. The image details card shows the distance in real pixels at full size, so you can see what you are setting. Low depth gives a crisp etched line along every edge; high depth gives broad, sculptural relief that ignores fine texture entirely.
An embossed image contains no depth information at all - your eye infers it from where the light seems to come from. People read light as falling from above, so with the light at the top left a shape looks like it is raised out of the surface. Move the light to the bottom right, 180 degrees away, and precisely the same relief flips into an engraving cut into the surface. That is one slider, not a second tool: drag the angle across and watch the picture turn inside out. The details card names the direction the light is coming from as you drag.
Grey is the classic embossing effect: one relief value per pixel, on flat mid grey, like a coin or a pressed sheet of metal. Because the difference is taken on brightness only, edges are clean and there are no coloured fringes - the red and cyan halos you see on other emboss filters come from running the kernel down each colour channel separately, which embosses three slightly different pictures and stacks them.
Colour keeps that same single relief and tints it with the picture's own colours, so a landscape comes out as a coloured relief map rather than a grey plate. It is the more useful mode for photographs, and the honest version of what other tools call a colour emboss.
For related relief effects: edge detection traces outlines without the lighting, pencil sketch turns a photo into drawn lines, dithering gives the pressed-print texture, and image to STL turns brightness into actual 3D geometry for printing or CNC rather than a picture of it.
Logos and text emboss well because they have hard edges and large flat areas - the flat parts go perfectly neutral and the letters stand up. Line drawings, maps, coins, fabric, leather and any photograph of a surface with texture do the same. Photographs of people are the hard case: skin is smooth, so faces tend to dissolve, and a high depth with a moderate strength usually works better than the reverse. If you want the result for digital prints, mockups or a stamped-metal look on a product page, export as PNG - JPG re-encoding adds its own texture to something that is already all texture.
The preview and the download run the same code over the pixels, so the file you save is what you were looking at, at the full resolution of the picture you opened, with no watermark and no signup. Nothing is uploaded - the image is decoded and embossed inside your browser, which matters when the picture is a client logo, an unreleased design or artwork you own. Transparency is kept.
It is a filter that turns an image into a raised relief lit from one side. It works by comparing the brightness on either side of each point: where the picture gets brighter in the direction of the light, the result goes bright; where it gets darker, the result goes dark; and where nothing changes, the result is flat mid grey. Your eye reads that pattern as a surface with height, which is why a flat photograph suddenly looks stamped into metal.
Open the picture here and this emboss maker applies the effect straight away. Set the depth for how coarse or fine the relief should be, the strength for how hard the lighting is, and the light angle for the direction it comes from, then download the result. Nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded, and you can emboss one image after another without reloading the page.
Move the light angle 180 degrees. The same relief lit from the bottom right reads as cut into the surface rather than standing out of it, because people instinctively assume light comes from above. Nothing else needs to change.
Either the depth is too low for the size of the picture, or the photo has very little edge detail - a portrait with soft skin and a blurred background has almost nothing to catch the light. Raise the depth first: on a large photo a one-pixel emboss, which is what most tools do, is a difference between two samples of the same noise. Pictures with hard edges, lettering or visible texture emboss far better.
Yes. Transparency is preserved, so a PNG logo with a transparent background comes back with the same transparency and the embossed shape inside it. Download as PNG to keep it; JPG has no transparency and will fill it in.
No. The picture is read straight from your device into the page, embossed there by your browser, and handed back as a download. It never reaches a server, which is worth knowing for a logo, a product photo or anything under an agreement that says no third-party uploads.