Wave-Line Shader
Turn any photo into banknote line art. Every bit of tone becomes a horizontal wavy line that swells in the shadows and thins to a hairline in the lights, in one ink on paper. It is the Banknote Wave-Line look from the Lookbook, done exactly instead of described to an image model.
Your photo never leaves your browser. The picture is drawn on this page, on your device. Nothing is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere.
Loading the demo image…
Tip: drop a photo onto the picture, or paste one. Big shapes with clear light and shade work best: a face, a statue, a building against the sky.
How it works
The page draws a set of evenly spaced horizontal lines and bends each one along a sine wave. For every line it reads how dark the photo is under that line, and makes the line that thick: thick in the shadows, so the dark areas fill in, and a hairline in the lights. A second, slower wave runs through the first, which gives the faint moiré you see on engraved notes. It runs as a WebGL fragment shader, with a slower Canvas fallback for browsers without WebGL.
The two demo pictures were made with an image model from the Banknote Wave-Line card's prompt. The model drew them with ordinary crosshatching; the shader turns them into true wave lines. The recreate page shows both side by side.