CRT Monitor Effect — Free Retro Scanline & Glow Filter for Photos
Turn any photo into a retro CRT screen shot — scanlines, phosphor glow, color fringing, curvature and screen glitch — free, with live preview, right in your browser.
What it does
Upload a photo and apply a retro CRT / old-monitor look: scanlines, a soft phosphor glow, RGB color fringing, screen curvature with a bezel edge, grain, and an optional tracking-glitch band. Everything updates live as you move the sliders, and you download a plain PNG when you’re happy with it.
How it works
The effect is built as a real per-pixel filter rather than a flat CSS overlay, which is why it holds up at any resolution: scanlines are spaced relative to the image so they don’t look too fine on a huge photo or too chunky on a small one, chromatic aberration is a genuine per-channel pixel offset (not a blurred double-exposure trick), and the curvature is a rounded clip mask with a darkened bezel frame rather than a real barrel-distortion warp — visually similar, and far cheaper to compute, so the preview stays smooth while you drag sliders.
Six presets — Arcade, Old TV, VHS, Amber terminal, Green terminal, and Off — set every slider at once to a sensible starting point; every slider stays fully adjustable afterward, and a phosphor tint (green, amber, or blue) recolors the image based on its actual brightness so light and dark areas keep their contrast instead of just getting a flat color wash.
How to use it
- Drop a photo onto the tool.
- Pick a starting preset, or leave it on the default and tweak sliders yourself.
- Adjust scanlines, glow, color fringing, vignette, grain, and curvature to taste — the canvas updates as you go.
- Turn on a phosphor tint or the tracking-glitch band if you want the full old-monitor look.
- Click Download image to save the result as a PNG.
- Reset to preset defaults snaps every slider back to whichever preset you last picked, in case you want to start over without re-uploading.
Want to see your before-and-after side by side rather than flipping between tabs? The compare slider tool can drag-reveal the original against your saved export.
FAQ
Does this upload my photo anywhere? No — the image is loaded, filtered, and exported entirely in your browser. Nothing leaves your device.
Why does the image look different every time I export, even with the same sliders? The grain and tracking-glitch effects are intentionally randomized each render, the same way real film grain or a wobbly old tape deck never looks pixel-identical twice. Turn grain to 0 and glitch off if you want a perfectly repeatable result.
Can I apply this to a screenshot or a piece of pixel art, not just a photo? Yes — any image works. Pixel art and pixelated screenshots in particular tend to look especially convincing with a CRT filter, since low-res source material is exactly what real CRTs were designed to display.
What’s the difference between “curvature” and “vignette”? Vignette darkens the corners of the image gradually. Curvature adds a rounded, bezel-like frame around the edge to suggest a curved screen — they’re meant to be used together but control different things.
Will this work on a very large photo? Yes, up to the browser’s own canvas size limits. Very large images (many megapixels) will render more slowly since the effect processes every pixel — if it feels sluggish, resize the photo down first with the image resizer.
Can I batch-process a folder of images with this? Not currently — this tool is built around live slider feedback on a single image at a time, since CRT-style settings are usually tuned by eye per photo.