Photo Filter Studio — Real-Time, GPU-Accelerated
Real-time exposure, contrast, saturation, warmth, blur, sharpen, vignette, and grain. GPU-accelerated via WebGPU; nothing uploads.
runs locally — nothing leaves your browser
What is Photo Filter Studio — Real-Time, GPU-Accelerated?
WebGPU Filter Studio is a real-time photo finishing tool that runs on your GPU. It chains a tone-mapping pass (exposure, contrast, saturation, warmth, gamma), a separable Gaussian blur, and a finishing pass (sharpen, vignette, film grain) entirely in WGSL fragment shaders. Each parameter update re-renders the full chain in milliseconds, so sliders feel like a desktop editor rather than a web upload form.
When to use this
- →Touching up screenshots, photos, or scans before sharing or embedding
- →Color-grading research figures so they print and project well
- →Producing a quick polished version of a phone photo without installing a desktop editor
- →Demoing what's now possible in a browser tab when WebGPU is available
How it works
The pipeline is three WGSL fragment passes. Pass 1 applies exposure (power-of-two scaling), contrast (around mid-gray), saturation (mix toward luminance), warmth (R/B offset), and gamma. Pass 2 is a horizontal Gaussian blur with weights computed from the radius. Pass 3 reuses the blur shader for vertical sampling, giving a proper separable Gaussian. Pass 4 is finishing: a five-tap sharpen, radial vignette, and hashed film grain. Each pass writes a new rgba8unorm texture, and the final result is read back, drawn to a canvas, and offered as a PNG.
Example use cases
Photo finishing
Apply a personal look to a photo without uploading it to a cloud editor.
Figure polish
Normalize exposure and contrast across figures in a paper or slide deck.
Live demos
Show off real-time GPU image processing in a tab — a fast way to communicate the WebGPU story.
Photo Filter Studio — Real-Time, GPU-Accelerated
Interactive ToolHow to use
- 1
Pick an image
Drop a JPG, PNG, or WebP.
- 2
Push the sliders
Exposure, contrast, saturation, warmth, gamma, blur, sharpen, vignette, grain — preview updates as you drag.
- 3
Download the PNG
Export the final result without ever leaving the browser.
Why use this tool?
- Nine filter parameters running as a multi-pass WebGPU shader chain
- Real-time slider response even on full-resolution images
- Separable Gaussian blur (horizontal then vertical) for proper, low-cost smoothing
- Single-pass tone, blur, and finishing passes — no quality loss from CPU round-trips
Frequently asked questions
- Why is it so fast compared to a CSS-filter-based editor?
- CSS filters are wrapped browser primitives with limited composition. This tool builds a custom WGSL pipeline that runs as native GPU code, with chained passes and direct texture I/O.
- Do the filters degrade quality?
- Each pass writes to rgba8unorm. For finishing-pass work this is fine; if you plan to layer many heavy filters consider applying them once at the end of your editing flow.
- Does it work without WebGPU?
- If WebGPU is missing the tool shows a fallback message pointing you to our Canvas-based image tools.
- Is my photo uploaded?
- No. All processing runs on your device's GPU; nothing is sent anywhere.
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