Solarize Effect
Flip the tones past a threshold into their negative: solarized photos with the darkroom look, a soft knee and a Photoshop-style curve.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Flip the tones past a threshold into their negative: solarized photos with the darkroom look, a soft knee and a Photoshop-style curve.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Solarization is the darkroom accident that became a style: a print re-exposed to light mid-development flips its brightest tones into their negative while the rest stays as shot, so a sky turns dark over a normal landscape and skin goes metallic. This tool does the same to any photo in the browser, the way solarised film photography did it with light. Pick a photo, choose which tones flip - Highlights, Shadows or the full Curve - and drag Threshold to set where the reversal starts. Softness widens the turn from a hard line into a band of tones, which is what stops the effect from drawing a contour around every gradient. The picture updates as you drag, the download is the full-size original with the same maths applied, and none of it leaves your device.
Highlights is the classic solarize filter - everything brighter than the threshold inverts, the rest keeps its tone. Shadows is the mirror image and inverts everything darker, which reads like a partial negative. Curve reproduces the Photoshop solarize command: a tent curve that runs black to white and back down, so midtones turn bright and both ends go dark; move Threshold to shift the peak and switch on Invert result for the bright, printed look most people picture when they say solarized. Apply by decides what the threshold is compared with. Each channel tests red, green and blue on their own and produces the colour reversals solarization is known for; Brightness tests the pixel as a whole, so it flips together and keeps its hue. The stage info card lists the mode, the threshold with its softness band and the comparison in use.
Download as PNG for an exact copy of the solarized pixels, JPG for a smaller file to post or send, or WebP for the smallest of the three. Transparent areas of a PNG stay transparent in PNG and WebP; JPG has no transparency and fills them. The pencil next to the file name renames the download, the copy button puts the result on the clipboard, and on a phone the share button hands it straight to another app.
A solarized photo is still your photo, and this page never sees it. The image is decoded in your browser, the threshold curve is a 256-entry lookup applied on your own processor, and the download is assembled on the device. There is no upload, no account and no server-side copy, so a portrait or a private snapshot can be solarized without it ever crossing the network.
It inverts the tones on one side of a brightness threshold and leaves the other side alone. With Highlights selected and the threshold at the middle, every value above the middle becomes its negative: bright skies go dark, white shirts go black, and the midtones and shadows stay as they were. The result is the surreal half-negative look of darkroom solarization, also called the Sabattier effect, and the same solarized images work as posters, album art or a striking profile picture.
Photoshop applies a fixed curve that maps black and white both to black and the midtone to white, with no settings. The Curve mode here is that same tent curve, but the threshold moves its peak, Softness rounds it, and Invert result flips it into the bright version. Highlights and Shadows are the threshold style of solarization Photoshop does not offer directly.
A threshold with zero softness is a hard cut: two neighbouring tones on either side of it end up far apart, so a smooth gradient like a sky shows a visible line where it crosses. Raise Softness to blend the inversion over a band of tones and the line becomes a gradual turn. Values around 10 to 30 keep the effect strong without the contour.
No. The photo, the preview and the download all stay in your browser. The solarize maths runs on your device, so nothing is transferred, stored or seen by anyone else.