Adjustments

Every global slider in the image editor's adjust panel (resolution, contrast, brightness, saturation, hue, noise and print finish) with its range and default, plus why working resolution shapes the whole look.

Open adjust in the bottom toolbar (the sliders icon). The same panel opens from the adjust tab on mobile. These sliders shape the photo before the effect runs, so they change the result of dither, halftone, ASCII and every other effect at once.

Reference

Slider	Range	Step	Default	Shown as
Resolution	0.1 to 2.0	0.1	2.0	10% to 200%
Contrast	0.5 to 3.0	0.1	1.2	0.5x to 3.0x
Brightness	0.5 to 2.0	0.1	1.05	0.5x to 2.0x
Saturation	0 to 2.0	0.1	1.15	0.0x to 2.0x
Hue	0 to 360	5	0	0° to 360°
Film grain	on or off		off	switch
Noise	0 to 1.0	0.05	0.04	0% to 100%
Print finish	on or off		on	switch
Strength (print finish)	0 to 1.0	0.05	0.85	0% to 100%

Values shown with one decimal are rounded for display, so a default of 1.05 can read as 1.1x.

Working with the sliders

Each row has a label, a slider, and a number on the right.

Drag the slider for quick changes. The preview updates as you drag.
Click the number to type an exact value, then press Enter to apply or Escape to cancel. Typed values snap to the slider's step and are kept inside its range. Type the value as displayed, for example 150 for 150% resolution or 1.4 for contrast.
When a slider has keyboard focus, the arrow keys nudge it one step at a time.

Each finished change (releasing the slider, pressing Enter, or letting go of an arrow key) is saved to the undo history, so Ctrl / Cmd + Z steps back one adjustment at a time.

Resolution

Resolution sets the size of the working grid, which is the number of cells the effect is computed on. It is the single most important slider in the editor.

Bitgrain doesn't run effects on every pixel of your photo. It first resamples the photo to a grid, runs the effect on that grid, then draws the result. How many cells that grid has depends on your photo's width, the resolution value and the kind of effect:

Effect family	Grid width at 100% resolution
Dither	0.4 cells per source pixel
Halftone, filters and most other effects	0.5 cells per source pixel
ASCII and braille	Set by their own density control instead of resolution

For example, a photo 4000 pixels wide gives a dither grid of about 1600 columns at 100% and about 3200 at 200%. To keep the preview responsive, the preview grid is capped at 2000 cells on its long edge.

Why it matters

Low resolution (10% to 60%) means fewer, bigger cells. Dither dots become chunky pixels, halftone gets coarse, and the image reads as graphic and retro. The Retro Game preset uses 55%.
High resolution (150% to 200%) means many small cells. Gradients become smooth, fine detail survives, and the result reads as a print rather than pixel art.
The texture you see belongs to the grid, not to your screen. When you export, Bitgrain keeps the look identical at full size. Dither, ASCII, braille, dot matrix, blocky and Grunge ASCII are rendered on the same grid as the preview and enlarged with hard-edged (nearest neighbor) scaling, so every dot and character stays crisp. Smooth effects such as halftone, pop grunge, manga, haze and grades are drawn again at the full output size with their cell sizes scaled to match, so you get the same number of dots as the preview, sharp at print size. See Exporting.

Tip: Presets, recipe links and random looks always land inside the slider's range. A shared link that asks for more than 200% is brought down to 200%.

Resolution and color grades

While a color grade is active, resolution is fixed at 200% and the adjust button is locked. Remove the grade to change it again. See Color palettes and LUTs.

Contrast

Contrast pushes tones away from the middle grey (values above 1.0) or pulls them toward it (below 1.0). It is the key slider for dithering: more contrast gives the dither algorithm clearer lights and darks to work with, so patterns look deliberate instead of muddy. Values between 1.3x and 1.8x suit most photos. Very high values crush detail into flat black and white, which can be exactly what you want for a poster or stamp look.

Brightness

Brightness multiplies every color channel. Values above 1.0 lift the whole image, values below darken it. With dithering, small changes go a long way: brightness decides how many cells land on the light side of the threshold, so a 0.1 change can noticeably thin out or fill in the dots.

Saturation

Saturation controls color intensity. 0 removes color entirely, 1.0 leaves it unchanged, and 2.0 doubles it. It matters when colorize is on or a palette is in use. Boosting saturation before a palette is applied helps colors snap to the more vivid palette entries.

Hue

Hue rotates every color around the color wheel by the chosen number of degrees. 0° and 360° are the same (no change). 180° swaps colors for their opposites, so blues become oranges. The Vaporwave preset uses a hue of 280° to push a photo toward magenta and purple. Hue does little when colorize is off and the output is black and white.

Noise

Noise controls the strength of grain-based textures. Turn on the Film grain switch in the adjust panel to add film grain under your current effect, and the Noise slider appears below it. The slider also shows when the grunge texture is active. At 0% the grain disappears completely. Presets can carry a noise value, and the default is 4%.

Film grain is seeded, so the same look on the same photo always gives the same grain.

Order of operations

Before the effect runs, adjustments are applied to the photo in a fixed order:

Brightness
Contrast
Saturation
Hue

Because contrast comes after brightness, raising brightness and then contrast gives a different result from the reverse. If a look feels off, try nudging brightness first, then contrast.

Print finish

Below the sliders is a switch labelled Print finish with the note "Paper grain, ink tone, soft edges". It is on by default, and a hint card points it out on your first visit.

Print finish is a last pass that makes the result feel like ink on paper rather than a flat digital file:

Shadows pick up a warm near-black ink tone and highlights take on the paper color.
Colors are muted slightly.
A soft, uneven mottle is laid over the image, like ink soaking into paper.
Fine grain is added, stronger in the shadows than the highlights.
A slight misregistration offset imitates plates that didn't line up perfectly.

When the switch is on, a Strength slider appears (0% to 100%, default 85%). Lower it for a subtler finish or switch the finish off entirely for a clean digital result.

A few things to know:

Print finish shows in the preview and is applied to raster downloads (PNG, WebP, JPEG, HDR and platform sizes).
It is skipped for ASCII and braille exports, which stay crisp.
The PNG colors slider in the export panel still applies when print finish is on. Push it to 100% to save the grain and ink tone in full color. See Exporting.
The grain and mottle are seeded, so two downloads of the same look are identical.

Other global controls

A few look-wide controls live outside the adjust panel:

Control	Where	What it does
colorize	Bottom toolbar (color on mobile)	Switches between color output and two-tone black and white. On by default. See Color palettes and LUTs.
Factor	Inside the dither popover	Dither strength, 10% to 200%, default 100%. See Dithering.
Palette	Bottom toolbar	Snaps the output to a fixed set of colors.
Haze	Bottom toolbar	Adds atmospheric glow on top of the effect. See the effects overview.