Highlighter Tool
Draw highlighter marks on a picture: the text under them stays readable, like a real marker on paper.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Draw highlighter marks on a picture: the text under them stays readable, like a real marker on paper.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
A photo highlighter has one job that most tools get wrong: when you drag a yellow bar across a line of text, the text has to stay readable. Paint a translucent color over the picture - which is what most image editors and the old version of this tool did - and the print underneath goes foggy, like reading through colored glass. A real highlighter doesn't do that: the ink soaks the paper and leaves the print alone. This tool works like the marker. The stroke multiplies into the image, so white paper takes the full color, black text stays black, and a screenshot you highlight still reads perfectly. Go over the same spot twice and it darkens a little more, exactly like a second pass of a real pen. It's the digital version of the row of highlighters on a desk, with no app to install: open the picture, highlight the key terms, and output an image.
Drop in a JPG, PNG or WebP - a screenshot, a photographed document, a scanned page, a slide, a diagram - and drag across whatever matters. Everything runs in your browser: the image is never uploaded, there's no signup, and no watermark is added.
The highlighter draws in two modes. Freehand follows your finger or mouse like a marker in your hand - circle something, underline a winding route on a map, scribble emphasis over a corner of a photo. Straight draws one clean bar from where you press to where you release, and it snaps level when you're close to horizontal - which is exactly what highlighting words in a picture wants. Tap without dragging and either mode leaves a single dot.
Five classic highlighter colors sit above the sliders - yellow, green, pink, blue and orange - plus a custom swatch that opens a full color picker if the annotation needs a brand color or something darker. Size sets how wide the stroke is relative to the picture, so a mark that covers one line of text in a phone screenshot covers one line in a 12-megapixel scan too. Intensity is how hard the marker presses: at full strength the color is a solid ink bar, lower it and the highlight turns into a light wash.
Every stroke is kept separately, so mistakes are cheap. Undo (or Ctrl+Z) takes back the last stroke, and keeps going back one stroke at a time. The eraser in the corner of the image works like the highlighter in reverse: rub over a highlighted area and the marks are wiped where you rub - only the marks, never the photo underneath. Because the eraser is a stroke too, undo can take an erase back as well.
The download gives you the highlighted image at the original resolution of the file you loaded - the marks are redrawn at full size, not scaled up from the preview, so edges stay crisp. A JPG you loaded downloads as a JPG by default, and PNG and WebP are one click away in the format menu. Transparency in a PNG is preserved.
Screenshots, mostly: the one line of an error message that matters, the setting to click in a tutorial, the sentence in a conversation you're sending to someone who won't read the whole thing. Then documents - a photographed contract clause, the total on a receipt, a date on a scanned letter - where the multiply ink keeps the fine print legible under the color. Teachers mark up worksheets, slides and pictures for class, picking out definitions and key terms. Reviewers mark the row of a spreadsheet screenshot, and anyone comparing two versions of anything marks what changed. JPEG photos from a phone work the same as PNG screenshots, so highlighting a detail in holiday photos before sharing them is the same drag as marking a contract. When the annotation needs to point rather than cover, the arrow tool draws arrows with the same kind of editable strokes, and for tinting a whole picture one color there's the color overlay tool.
Open the image here, switch to Straight mode, and drag across the line of text - the bar snaps level and the text stays readable under the color. Download when you're done; it's free, with no account and no watermark, and the image never leaves your browser.
Because the color is multiplied into the image instead of painted over it. Multiplying darkens the light paper to the highlighter color but can't lighten the dark ink, so black text keeps its full contrast - the same physics as a real marker on a printed page. Tools that paint a translucent color over the picture fog the text instead.
Yes. JPG, PNG and WebP all load, and the highlighted image downloads free at full resolution. A JPG comes back out as a JPG by default; pick PNG in the format menu if you'd rather avoid a second round of JPG compression.
Press Undo (or Ctrl+Z) to take back the last stroke, as many times as you need. For part of a mark, use the eraser button in the corner of the image and rub over the spot - it erases the highlighter ink where you rub and leaves the photo untouched.
Yes - five classic marker colors plus a custom color picker, a Size slider for the stroke width, and an Intensity slider for how strong the ink is. Each stroke keeps the settings it was drawn with, so you can mark one thing in yellow and the next in pink.
No - this page is the whole app. It's a digital highlighter that runs in any browser, on a phone or a computer, so there's nothing to install to make a highlight on a photo. Open the image, mark it, and the output downloads as a normal image file.
No. The image is opened, highlighted and saved entirely in your browser through the canvas API. Nothing is transmitted to any server, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.