2Pick your effects — grayscale, sepia, invert, blur, sharpen, brightness, contrast and saturation — and set the strength of each.
3Apply them all in a single pass rather than running the tool repeatedly, which is what accumulates visible damage.
4Download the filtered HEIC file, and keep your original: it is the only undo you have.
HEIC Filters FAQ
How does HEIC Filters apply an effect?
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Concretely, the wide-gamut HEIC is decoded before filtering, which matters: applying a colour filter after a naive sRGB conversion is what produces the washed-out results people blame on the filter itself. You pick the effect and its strength and the transform is applied to the whole file at once.
Which effects are available?
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Grayscale, sepia, invert, blur, sharpen, and brightness, contrast and saturation adjustment. They can be combined, and combining them in one pass is better than running the tool repeatedly.
Does the source format change how a filter looks?
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It can. this format is read and written by the same streaming pipeline as everything else we support. Colour depth and the palette model in particular decide how smoothly a gradient or a blur can be represented.
Anything specific to HEIC to keep in mind?
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Yes — HEIC decoding needs the HEVC licence stack that Windows and most browsers ship without, which is usually the real reason the file is here at all. That is often the difference between an effect looking clean and looking banded.
Can I undo a filter after downloading?
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No — the effect is baked into the output pixels, which is the point of applying it. Keep the original file; that is your undo. Grayscale and blur in particular discard information that genuinely cannot be recovered.
Can I apply the same look to a whole set?
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Yes. One filter configuration is applied across the batch, which is how you get a visually consistent gallery rather than a set of individually-tweaked images that almost match.
What can I upload to HEIC Filters?
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HEIC and HEIF files straight off an iPhone or iPad, including 10-bit captures. You do not need the HEVC codec installed locally — the decoding happens on our side, which is usually the entire reason to do this in a browser.
Is there a file size limit on HEIC Filters?
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Yes: free accounts process images up to 25 MB each, which comfortably covers iPhone HEIC captures — HEIC is roughly half the size of the equivalent JPG. A 12-megapixel HEIC is typically 1.5-3 MB, so the limit only becomes relevant for burst exports or 48 MP ProRAW-adjacent captures.
Will HEIC Filters lower the quality of my HEIC images?
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HEIC stores a HEVC-coded image that is already very efficient, so the honest answer is that any re-encode costs a little. Where the operation can be applied without a full decode-encode cycle we do that; where it cannot, HEIC has enough headroom that the result is visually indistinguishable at normal viewing sizes.
Can I run HEIC Filters on several HEIC images at once?
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Yes, and an iPhone export is usually exactly the case for it — drop the whole camera roll selection in and it processes in parallel with one set of settings.
Does the Live Photo / depth data survive?
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No. The paired motion clip and the depth map are Apple container extras rather than part of the still image, and they do not survive processing. The still itself, its EXIF and its colour profile do.
Does HEIC Filters cost anything?
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No. HEIC Filters is free, no account, no watermark, and no Apple device required at any point. Uploads are deleted shortly after the job finishes.
