Changelog

🎛️ Presets Now Show the Advanced Controls They Use

Loading a preset in Simple mode could leave advanced settings active with no control on screen to see or adjust them. The controls a preset actually changes now appear, marked in italics, without switching the whole interface to Advanced.

🎨 Harmonize Your Gradient in One Click

A new Harmonize button in the Gradient Map editor snaps your color stops onto a matching color-theory scheme (complementary, analogous, triadic, and more) in a single click.

🖼️ Source Color Mode

A new Source color mode samples the original photo's colors for each dot, with Lightness Clamp and Vibrance sliders to tune how bright and saturated those sampled colors appear.

🔷 Choose a Region-Merging Strategy

When region merging is on, a new Strategy control lets you pick Fractal — which tiles the grid into clean, nested blocks that align with the dot shape — alongside the existing Greedy merging.

🌈 Smoother Gradient Blends with OKLCH

The Gradient Map now offers OKLCH interpolation for perceptually smooth, natural transitions between color stops, and the built-in presets (Rainbow, Thermal, Sunset, Neon…) have been updated to use it.

✂️ Smoother, Faster Mask Outlines

Mask outline tracing has been rebuilt to produce smoother, more accurate outlines that keep sharp corners crisp, and it now adds a Tracing Mode switch (Faithful or Geometric) and a Corner Threshold control. Tracing also runs in the background, so the app no longer freezes while a mask is generated.

⭕ One Incircle Shape That Fits Your Grid

The two separate Incircle shapes (Hexagonal and Square) are now a single Incircle style that automatically fits itself to whichever grid you're using, so you no longer have to match the variant to your grid by hand.

📤 Share Your Artwork Straight to Social Apps

A new Share button on mobile sends your rendered halftone to the device's share sheet, so you can post it to a social or messaging app without saving the file first.

💬 Tooltips Work Properly on Touch Devices

Fixed tooltips on phones and tablets opening unreliably and, once open, not closing when you tapped again — a tap now reliably shows and dismisses them.

🖼️ New Preset Gallery

A new preset gallery lets you browse a curated set of ready-made looks as thumbnails and apply any one to your image with a single click. It's free for everyone.

🌗 Better Tonal Balance on High-Contrast Images

Tonal normalization now ignores a tiny fraction of the very brightest and darkest pixels before stretching contrast, so a single bright highlight or a stray hot pixel no longer washes out the whole range and your image keeps balanced dot coverage.

🎨 Applying a Preset No Longer Renders Stale Colors

Fixed applying a preset, restoring a snapshot, or using undo and redo sometimes drawing with the previous settings' colors before catching up.

🌈 New Gradient Map Color Mode

A new Gradient color mode paints your halftone across a full multi-color gradient instead of just two colors, mapping dark-to-light tones through as many color stops as you like. A built-in editor lets you add, move, recolor, reverse, and evenly distribute stops, pick from ten ready-made gradients like rainbow, thermal, sepia, ocean, sunset, and neon, and save your own gradients to reuse later — and the gradient carries through to SVG export.

🎨 Blob Shape Colors Each Blob From Your Image

The Blob shape used to fill its whole outline with one flat color, ignoring Use Source Colors and gradients; now every separate blob takes its own color from the image region beneath it, so blobs reflect real color and tone.

✨ Detail Boost Brings Out Weak Stippling Detail

When stippling with the Detail density method, a single strong outline used to soak up all the dots and leave flat interior areas nearly bare. A new Detail Boost slider lifts faint interior detail so subtle textures and structure get stippled too, and even at zero the placement no longer lets one hard edge dominate the whole image.

🧊 Stippling No Longer Freezes at the Lowest Collide Radius

Dragging the stippling Collide Radius all the way down could hang the app while it generated the dot layout; the minimum is now 0.1 so point placement always has room to work.

↩️ Undo and Redo Now Cover Crop and Mask

Undo and Redo now step back through Crop and Mask edits as well as parameter changes, so an unwanted crop or mask no longer has to be reversed by hand.

📊 Progress Bar Paces Itself Realistically

The canvas progress bar now paces each stage from how long it actually takes on your machine, so it advances evenly instead of stalling — a slow blur now shows movement rather than appearing frozen.

🎲 Identical Settings Now Produce Identical Renders

Fixed noise-based effects like grid displacement and stippling coming out differently every time you reloaded the page or ran an export, which made snapshots and presets fail to reproduce the render you saved.

📄 SVG Export No Longer Returns an Empty File in Pixel Mode

Selecting SVG while the Pixel renderer is active used to download or copy an empty file; the app now explains that "SVG export is unavailable with the pixel renderer" and blocks the export instead, in single exports and batch runs alike.

📱 Android Photo Picker Images Stay Usable

Fixed images chosen from the Android photo picker loading fine at first but then failing later when the app re-read them, such as when cropping or restoring a snapshot.

🔺 New Delaunay Low-Poly Style

A new Delaunay style in the shape picker triangulates your dots into a faceted, low-poly halftone — dark areas fill with dense triangles while bright ones open into gaps, and each triangle is colored from your image. A Corner Rounding control softens the triangles toward circles, and Max Edge Length trims the oversized triangles that would otherwise span sparse areas.

📏 Size Offset for Uniform Dot Resizing

A new Size Offset control grows or shrinks every dot by a fixed amount on top of the existing size multipliers, letting you thicken or thin all shapes uniformly regardless of tone.

⚡ Region Merging Updates Live as You Drag

Region Merging now redraws in real time while you drag its settings, instead of showing unmerged dots and only catching up a moment after you stop. Large merge radiuses that used to take seconds now apply almost instantly.

🎛️ Expert Mode Retired, Pixel Controls Moved to Advanced

The interface mode picker is now just Simple and Advanced — the Pixel panel that used to require Expert mode is part of Advanced, and anyone on Expert has been moved to Advanced with the full set of controls.

🔗 Region Merging Moved into Grid Settings

Region Merging now sits in the Grid Settings panel instead of its own separate panel, and it only appears on the grid types it actually affects — square, hexagonal, and line — instead of showing controls that did nothing.

🛡️ No More Startup Crash When Browser Storage Is Blocked

Fixed a crash on first load for people whose browser blocks site storage (such as some in-app browsers or strict privacy settings); the app now falls back to its defaults instead of failing to open.

🗻 Very Large Images No Longer Fail to Process

Fixed an error that could stop very large image uploads (around a gigabyte or more) from being processed.

📤 Upload HEIC, AVIF, and More Formats

Uploads now accept any image your browser can open — including iPhone HEIC/HEIF photos, AVIF, and JPEG XL — instead of silently ignoring files whose format wasn't recognized. Works in the app, batch mode, and the background remover.

🖼️ Artwork Card Fits Longer Artist Profiles

The app's artwork info card now grows to show longer artist descriptions in full instead of clipping them, and long website links are shortened with an ellipsis so the link icon stays visible.

🩹 App No Longer Shows a Blank Screen on Older Browsers

Fixed a startup crash that left the app blank on older browsers such as Chrome before version 98 and Android 5, where a missing browser feature stopped the page from loading.

⏱️ See Where Rendering Spends Its Time

A new Pipeline Timing overlay, toggled from the parameter panel, breaks down how long each stage of the render takes, so you can see what's slowing things down when tuning heavy settings.

⚡ Density Sizing Updates Live as You Drag

With Density Sizing on, adjusting tone and size controls like brightness, gamma, contrast, and scale factor now resizes dots in real time while you drag, instead of showing base-sized dots and only snapping to the density sizes a moment after you let go.

🫧 Blob Merging Now Scales with Dot Size

Blob connections are now driven by dot size and Merge Strength, so large dots merge across wider gaps while small dots stay separate — regardless of grid spacing. Merge Strength is also recalibrated to a geometrically consistent reference, so at full strength touching dots close up into a clean, even circular hole.

🖋️ Place Stippling Points by Detail, Not Just Tone

Stippling's new Placement Basis control lets you switch from Tone to Detail so points cluster around edges and fine detail, with a Detail Range slider to tune how large an area each point considers.

🎨 Stippling Now Responds to Brightness, Contrast & Gamma

Tonal adjustments like brightness, gamma, contrast, normalization, and invert now shape where stippling places its points, so stippling matches the tone of the regular dot output.

🫧 Blobs Merge Correctly in Sparse Areas

Blob shapes now connect based on how far apart nearby dots actually are, so sparse regions — like areas thinned out by Density Sizing — merge as expected instead of leaving grown dots stranded.

🔍 Pixel Preview Now Matches the Export

Pixel-shape previews now render at the same supersample factor as the final export, so what you see while editing matches the downloaded result instead of looking rougher on screen.

✨ Tidier Controls Panel

A round of layout polish across the settings panels — related controls are grouped with dividers, options that don't apply to the current shape or grid are now hidden, and the artwork info card no longer overlaps the dot counter.

🎚️ Mobile Slider Value Now Applies Correctly

Fixed an issue where a mobile slider's value was not reflected correctly.

🧩 Live Settings JSON Editor

A new "Edit as JSON" panel lets you view and edit every halftone parameter as live JSON. It mirrors your current settings in real time, validates your edits, and applies them back to the canvas — with copy, revert, and undo support.

🎛️ Irrelevant Controls Now Grey Out Consistently

Settings that have no effect under your current mode are now reliably disabled across every panel, so it's clearer at a glance which controls actually apply to what you're making.

🔄 Panels Stay in Sync After Shape Swaps and Preset Loads

After swapping shapes from the toolbar — or loading a preset, undoing, or applying JSON — panel controls like the shape style selector could show a stale or blank value instead of your actual setting. They now update reliably to match.

🌎 Brazilian Portuguese Added, Portuguese Refined

Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR) is now available as its own language, and the existing Portuguese option is now proper European Portuguese (Portugal).

🗣️ Suggestion to Switch to Your Preferred Language

When your browser's preferred language is supported but differs from what's shown, the app now offers to switch the interface to it, with an option to dismiss the prompt permanently.

🌐 Browser Page Translation No Longer Breaks the App

Using your browser's built-in page translation (such as Google Translate) could crash the editor and leave a blank or broken screen. The app now keeps working when a translator rewrites the page.

🌏 Traditional Chinese Now Available

Halftone Maker is now available in Traditional Chinese (zh-TW), joining the other supported languages.

🔢 Dot Count Now Matches the Canvas

The rendered dot count could read higher than what actually appears — it counted dots that never got drawn and, in Blob mode, showed a stale number instead of the merged shapes. The count now reflects exactly what lands on the canvas.

🫥 Control Over Transparent Areas

A new "Discard transparent areas" toggle in the Sampling panel (shown in Advanced mode and above) lets you decide whether fully transparent regions of your image stay blank (the default) or get filled with the pattern — turn it off and lowering the Scale Factor will draw dots across the transparent areas too, instead of leaving them empty.

🔤 Character Shape in Advanced Mode

The Character dot shape is now selectable from Advanced mode, not just Expert, so you can build text-and-glyph patterns without switching to the most complex UI level.

🧰 Tidier Toolbar

When there are more grid and shape buttons than fit across the toolbar, the extras now tuck into a popover instead of forcing a horizontal scroll, so every option stays one click away.

🖱️ Smoother File Drag-and-Drop

Dragging an image file onto the app used to stutter as the whole layout re-rendered; the drop area is now isolated, so dragging a file in stays smooth.

🫧 Blob Dot Style

A new Blob style lets neighboring dots melt into smooth, gooey shapes joined by tapered necks — close dots merge fatly while distant ones pull apart and separate. Dial the look with Merge Strength, and rein in busy areas with Min Neck Width and a Max Necks limit.

⚡ Faster Line Shapes

Line-shape rendering now runs its heavy geometry math in WebAssembly, cutting render time roughly in half so line patterns update more smoothly as you adjust them.

🔓 Pro Features No Longer Blocked by a Wrong Device Clock

If your device's clock was off by more than a few minutes, a valid Pro license could be rejected — silently disabling downloads, the higher resolution cap, batch, snapshots, and other Pro features. A freshly signed-in Pro license is now honored regardless of local clock skew.

👆 Touch Slider Mode on Desktop

A new toggle next to the UI-mode control switches the parameter sliders into touch-friendly mode, where you drag the thumb to adjust values — handy on touchscreen laptops or if you prefer thumb-dragging over clicking a track.

✏️ Stippling Is Now a Grid Type

Stippling moved out of its own panel and into the grid toolbar, so you pick it like any other grid and the stipple pattern updates live as you adjust its settings or swap the image — no more clicking Compute to generate it or Discard to clear it.

⚡ Faster Stippling

Stippling's point-scattering and relaxation now run in WebAssembly, so the pattern generates and updates noticeably faster while you tweak it.

🧊 No More Freeze with Source Colors on Text & SVG Dots

Turning on "Use Source Colors" with text or custom-SVG dots could freeze the tab on dense renders — those dots now keep their per-dot colors at normal speed.