Black and White Photo Filter
Drop the colour and keep the tones. Opens already converted, with the contrast and grain to finish it if you want them.
No photo? Try a sample
Presets in this editor
iPhone 4
Soft edges, gentle grain, slightly warm 2010s smartphone vibe.
Grain 38 · Softness 32 · Vignette 18
Warm Digicam
Golden-hour point-and-shoot warmth with punchy colors.
Grain 28 · Softness 18 · Warmth 66
Cool CCD
Cleaner, slightly cool vintage sensor feel (subtle green/cyan lean).
Grain 22 · Softness 14 · Aberration 12
Flash Pop
Harsh highlights + glow like a built-in flash at night.
Bloom 20 · Grain 18 · Contrast 60
Soft Nostalgia
Dreamy, faded, warm — heavy softness + bloom for a nostalgic vibe.
Softness 48 · Grain 30 · Bloom 26
2000s Y2K
Warm, faded early-digicam color with soft grain and a gentle vignette.
Grain 30 · Fade 18 · Softness 16
Disposable Flash
Hard close-flash glow, warm grain, casual single-use snapshot energy.
Grain 26 · Bloom 24 · Softness 12
Huji-Style
Warm flashed glow with grain, made for the corner date stamp.
Grain 29 · Softness 14 · Bloom 14
Dazz-Style
Cool CCD glow with extra bloom and old-sensor color fringe.
Grain 22 · Bloom 14 · Aberration 13
Kodak Gold
Golden film warmth with soft skin tones and fine grain.
Grain 22 · Warmth 63 · Softness 12
35mm Film
Fine grain and restrained, true-to-life analog color.
Grain 25 · Softness 14 · Vignette 8
Film Grain
Fine, even film texture over otherwise natural color.
Grain 35 · Softness 10 · Fade 10
Lomo Punch
Dark toy-camera vignette with loud, punchy color.
Vignette 30 · Grain 23 · Saturation 62
Vintage Fade
Old-print warmth with lifted blacks and darkened corners.
Grain 28 · Fade 21 · Softness 20
Polaroid
Washed instant-film fade with gentle warmth and a soft glow.
Softness 22 · Fade 21 · Vignette 20
Frequently Asked Questions
Open the photo on this page and it arrives already converted — the saturation control starts at zero, which strips the colour completely. Nothing else about the picture is altered, so what you get is your own photo in grey rather than a styled monochrome look. Download saves a copy; the original is untouched.
Because a greyscale conversion weights the channels by how bright the eye finds them, not equally. This tool uses the standard weights: 29.9 percent red, 58.7 percent green, 11.4 percent blue. Green counts more than five times as much as blue, which is why foliage comes out brighter than it looks and a deep blue sky comes out much darker.
No. That is a selective-colour edit and it needs masking, which this tool does not do. It converts the whole frame or none of it.
No, and that is the opposite job. Colourising a monochrome photo means inventing colour that was never recorded, which needs a model trained for it. This page only removes colour that is already there.
Yes, with the Contrast slider once the colour is gone. Raising contrast is what gives monochrome the graphic look people associate with it, since without colour to separate objects the tonal difference has to do all the work. Grain suits it too.
Free, no account, no watermark, and nothing is uploaded. The conversion happens in your own browser, which is why it works on a phone with nothing installed.
About This Tool
Removing colour from a photograph sounds like the simplest edit there is, and it is the one most tools get subtly wrong. There is no single correct grey for a given colour, because the eye does not treat the three channels equally: green looks far brighter to us than blue does at the same intensity. A conversion that ignores that produces grey mush, with skies too pale and leaves too dark.
This page uses the standard weighting — 29.9 percent red, 58.7 percent green, 11.4 percent blue. Green counts more than five times as heavily as blue, which is why a deep blue sky lands convincingly dark and why foliage comes out lighter than most people expect. It is the same arithmetic every serious photo tool uses, and it is what makes a monochrome photo read as tonal rather than washed out.
The photo arrives already converted, because that is what you came for. From there the two controls worth reaching for are Contrast and Grain. Without colour to separate one object from another, tonal difference has to carry the whole image, so monochrome usually wants more contrast than the colour version did. Grain suits it for the same reason it suits film.
What this will not do: keep one colour while draining the rest, which needs masking, or put colour back into a photo that never had it. Everything runs in your browser, free, with no account and no watermark.
Why every colour does not become the same grey
Pure red, pure green and pure blue are all equally intense as numbers in a file, and they look nothing like equally bright to a human. Green reads as far brighter than blue at the same value. A greyscale conversion that averages the three channels ignores that and produces the washed-out result people associate with a bad black-and-white filter: pale skies, muddy foliage, no separation anywhere.
The fix is to weight the channels by perceived brightness, and the weights below are the ones this tool applies.
| Channel | Weight | What that does to the picture |
|---|---|---|
| Green | 58.7% | Carries most of the brightness. Foliage, grass and anything lit through leaves comes out lighter than people expect. |
| Red | 29.9% | Roughly half of green. Skin holds up well, which is why portraits survive the conversion with the least effort. |
| Blue | 11.4% | Counts for very little. A deep blue sky drops to a dark tone, and it is the main reason a converted landscape can look dramatic without any editing at all. |
A worked example, since the numbers are more convincing than the explanation. A saturated orange at RGB 180, 102, 28 becomes grey 117 under these weights. Convert it by the naive method instead — the midpoint between the brightest and darkest channel — and you get 104. Thirteen levels does not sound like much until it happens across every warm tone in the frame at once.
Three things to do after the colour is gone
The conversion is the start, not the finish. A photo that was perfectly judged in colour is usually a little flat once the colour has gone, for a reason worth understanding rather than just correcting.
1Raise the contrast
In colour, two objects can be told apart by hue alone. Take the hue away and that particular tool is gone — shape and texture still separate things, but tone is carrying more of the load, so a monochrome photo often wants more contrast than its colour version did.
2Add some grain
Grain reads as intentional in black and white in a way it does not always in colour, because it echoes film. It also breaks up any flat areas the conversion has left, which is a common problem in skies.
3Check the sky
The blue channel is weighted so low that skies often land darker than you meant. If it has gone too far, easing Contrast back is the fix — the conversion itself is fixed, and fighting it elsewhere usually costs you the separation you just gained.
Grain and its own settings have a page of their own, and if the aim is an old photograph rather than a modern monochrome one, the darker corners and lifted blacks that go with it are covered in how to make a photo look old.
Two things this cannot do
It cannot keep one colour and drain the rest. That effect needs a mask around whatever is staying colourful, and masking is outside what a slider-based editor does; the conversion here is all or nothing.
And it cannot go the other way. Colourising an old monochrome photo is not the reverse of this operation, because the colour was never recorded in the first place — it has to be invented by a model trained to guess what was probably there. That is a different kind of tool, and worth knowing before you spend time here looking for the setting.
Also on this site
There are also the date stamp tool and the vignette tool, listed together on the tools page. If you would rather apply a finished look in one step than set anything yourself, that is what the filters are for.