Swirl Effect
Twist a photo around a center point you drag: clockwise or back the other way.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Want free-hand warping brushes instead? Try Liquify Image
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Twist a photo around a center point you drag: clockwise or back the other way.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Want free-hand warping brushes instead? Try Liquify Image
Drag on the photo to move the center point.
The swirl effect rotates the middle of a circle and leaves its edge alone, so the picture appears to spin into a spiral without tearing away from the rest of the image. Drag anywhere on the photo to put the center where you want it, set how far it turns, and set how much of the picture gets caught. The preview follows as you drag.
The rotation is strongest at the center and fades to nothing at the edge of the radius. That is what stops the effect ending on a hard ring: at the rim the pixels have not moved at all, so the swirled area blends into the untouched picture around it.
Drop a photo onto the page or paste one from the clipboard, then drag on the image to place the center. Set the angle - around 90 to 180 degrees reads as a clear twist, 360 and beyond as a full spiral - and drag the radius until the circle covers what you want. Negative angles swirl the other way, which is the reverse swirl. Download as PNG, JPG or WebP. Everything runs in your browser: nothing is uploaded, there is no signup, and no watermark is added.
Angle is how far the center turns, in degrees, and it goes from -1080 to 1080 - three full turns either way. Small values in the 30 to 60 range give a subtle sense of motion, useful when you want the picture to stay readable. Between 90 and 270 the effect reads clearly as a twist. At the extremes the middle becomes a tight spiral and the original subject stops being recognisable, which is the point for abstract and psychedelic work.
Radius decides how much of the image is affected, as a share of its longer side, and the panel shows the figure in pixels as you drag. A small radius on a face makes a local distortion; a radius covering the whole frame turns the entire picture into a vortex.
Editors call this a swirler, a twister or a swirling filter, and it turns up in the same places: faces are the most common target - a swirl centred on an eye or the middle of a portrait is the standard funhouse distortion, and it is what most of the searches for this effect are after. Beyond that it is used for psychedelic and retro poster art, album covers, abstract backgrounds, swirly patterns, and for suggesting motion in a still picture: a swirl centred on a wheel or a whirlpool exaggerates something already spinning.
Because the rotation fades out at the rim, it also works as a subtle touch. A gentle swirl at a low angle across a large radius reads as a soft warp rather than an obvious filter.
If you want to push pixels around by hand with a brush instead of a single circular rotation, the liquify tool is the one for that, and it includes a twirl brush. For a spherical bulge or a pinch around a point, bulge and pinch uses the same drag-the-center interaction as this page. The fish eye effect gives a whole-frame lens distortion, and warp image bends the picture on a grid.
The preview works on a scaled copy so dragging stays smooth, and the download re-runs the same mapping on the full-resolution pixels, so the saved image is sharp rather than an enlarged preview. It needs no WebGL, which older swirl tools required and refused to run without. All of it happens on your device: no image is transmitted anywhere, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.
Open the photo here, drag on it to place the center of the swirl, then set the angle and the radius. The preview updates as you drag, so you can stop where it looks right. Download it as PNG, JPG or WebP at full resolution. No account or upload is involved.
Yes. Drag the angle slider below zero and the twist runs in the opposite direction - that is the reverse swirl. Zero leaves the image untouched.
Drag the center onto the face, then bring the radius down until the circle sits around it. Because the rotation fades to nothing at the edge of that circle, the rest of the photo stays exactly as it was, with no visible boundary.
Yes, if you know the settings that made it. Put the center back in the same place, set the same radius, and use the same angle with a minus sign - the rotation is the exact inverse, so it maps every pixel back where it came from. The result is slightly softer than the original because the picture has been resampled twice, and if you do not know the original center, radius and angle you are guessing at three numbers at once.
They are two names for the same distortion - a rotation that is strongest at a center point and falls away with distance. Some editors call it twirl, some call it swirl or whirl.
No. The mapping runs on the CPU, so it works in any modern browser, including ones where the older WebGL-based swirl tools simply refused to start.
No. The image is decoded, swirled and encoded in your browser, at preview and at full download resolution alike. Nothing is sent to any server, and the tool keeps working with the network disconnected once the page is open.