Sometimes all you want is one effect on an image you already have, and opening a full editor for it feels absurd. I ran three browser tools through their paces: one builds repeating patterns, one turns photos into halftone dots or stipple, one tracks moving blobs in video and draws boxes around them.
Nothing to install. Two of the three are free with no strings. Where the third one stops being free is the most useful thing I can tell you, so it gets its own section below.
Patterns: Patterninja
Patterninja (patterninja.com) makes repeating pattern tiles. Skip the intro tutorial and you land on a demo already filling the screen — lemons and peaches on red. The whole window is the live preview, which is a nice change from squinting at a thumbnail.
A vertical toolbar sits on the right with nine items: new pattern, pick colors, image library, layers, pattern parameters, download, share, your stuff, help. You drop in icons from the library or upload your own art, then scale and rotate each element into place.
Downloading taught me the things the marketing copy leaves out. The default tile is 250 by 250 pixels. You can change that in pattern parameters, so set it before you build if you need something bigger. My PNG came out at 250 by 250 and about 13KB; the SVG was 9KB.
I opened the SVG to see what was in it. The icons are real vector paths, not embedded bitmaps, so scaling up for print holds. One thing rides along: a line inside the file saying the image was made on Patterninja.com. It is file metadata, not a visible watermark on your artwork.
The download also never touches a server — the link is the image data itself, generated in the browser. No login anywhere.
Halftone and stipple: tooooools.app
tooooools.app is a shelf of effects. The sidebar lists stippling, dots, patterns, edge, distort, displace, dithering, bevel, recolor, scatter, cellular automata, gradients, CRT and ASCII, plus two animation effects for video.
I uploaded a 1730 by 909 PNG — one of the photo backgrounds we use on this site. There was no waiting. The photo was already dots by the time I looked at it. The controls go deeper than I expected: threshold, grid type (regular or Benday), grid angle, minimum and maximum dot size, corner radius, step size, noise. A separate panel lets you fix blur, grain, gamma and black and white points before the effect runs.
One distinction worth knowing. Stippling and dots are separate menu items, and they do different things. I ran stippling at its defaults and got dense vertical bars rather than scattered points — its controls are about squares per axis, not dot sizes. If the look in your head is a photo dissolving into dots, dots is the one you want. The URL for the other one is even spelled /effects/stipping, missing an l, which is how you know a real person built this.
One annoyance: switching effects drops your upload. Going from dots to stippling cleared the filename and I had to upload again. Comparing several effects on one image means repeating that.
Export needed no login and carried no watermark. My PNG came out 600 by 315, because the canvas size field defaults to 600 and that is what it renders. Raise it, or export SVG, if the result is going anywhere near print.
The usage terms are stated in one line on the site: free for personal and commercial use, attribution not required but appreciated. That plainness is rarer than it should be.
Video tracking: Baby Track
Baby Track (artkit.cc/baby-track) does something else entirely. Give it video and it finds moving blobs, wraps each in a box, and follows them — the surveillance-camera look that keeps showing up in edits right now.
I had no clip to test with, so I generated one: five seconds, 640 by 360, three white squares moving along sine paths on a black background. It caught all three the moment the file landed, drew boxes, and joined them with thin connector lines.
Being honest about that test: white shapes on black is the easiest possible case. How well it holds on real footage with a busy background, I did not verify. The site knows this is the hard part — a banner at the top suggests its sibling tool MotionTrack when the background is static.
There is a lot to fiddle with. Fourteen box styles (crosshair, label, frame, grid, particle, scope, an old-Windows-window one) and thirteen filters (glitch, thermal, pixel, blur, dither, X-ray, water, CRT). Playback speed, how many blobs to track, text overlays, sound.
Export ran without a login and gave me a WebM: VP9, 640 by 360, 148 frames, 91KB. I pulled two frames out of it to check, and there was no watermark on either.
Three tools, three different meanings of free
| Tool | Makes | Export | Free terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patterninja | Pattern tiles | SVG, PNG (250px default) | No license page at all |
| tooooools.app | 16 image and video effects | PNG, SVG (600px default) | Personal and commercial, stated |
| Baby Track | Blob tracking on video | WebM free, MP4 is PRO | $25 one-off unlocks the rest |
Baby Track is the clearest of the three. Its pricing screen asks $25 once for lifetime access, and that covers all fourteen tools in the Artkit set. What stays locked on the free tier: color control, connector lines, audio, high-quality export, MP4. Put another way, the tracking itself and WebM export cost nothing. I think $25 is fair for what it does, though that depends on how often you would reach for it.
tooooools states its terms outright, as quoted above. There is a creator credit and a support link, and that is the whole business model on display.
Patterninja is the vague one. I could not find a license or terms anywhere in the app, and /terms, /about, /license and /privacy all returned 404. The only scope statement is that opening line: patterns can be downloaded in high resolution and used for printing and the web. Where the library icons came from is not documented.
So here is how I treat it. For a blog background or personal work, the library icons are fine. For a logo or something I intend to sell, I build the pattern only from art I uploaded myself. Effects tools sit on top of your source material, which means the rights in your result trace back to the photo you fed in. I went through that in detail in the free image sites post.
What I would use
For a thumbnail or slide background, Patterninja. Raise the tile size first, export SVG, and it survives print.
For giving one photo a retro print look, the dots effect on tooooools. Bump the canvas size above 600 before you export. Clicking through all sixteen effects is also a fine way to lose twenty minutes.
For video, Baby Track — but run a short clip through the free tier first and decide after you see the result. If the tracking misses what you wanted, $25 is wasted; if it nails it, thirteen more tools come along with it.
We do not use effects like these on our post images. Each post gets a title card we build ourselves, over a photo background chosen so you can tell what the post is about at a glance. The file I used for the halftone test was one of those backgrounds, and turning it into dots made it unrecognizable — a striking image that no longer told you anything. The effect was good. The job was wrong.
Tools that build letters and fonts rather than effects are in a separate post. If what you actually need is photo editing, there is the free editors roundup. Prices and screens above are as of 26 July 2026.