The effect stack
The Effects inspector tab is this app’s Effect Controls. Every effect applied to the selected layer appears in order, and order matters — a blur after a glow is a different picture from a glow after a blur.
Adding an effect
| Route | Best for |
|---|---|
| The Effects inspector tab | Browsing the full catalogue |
| The Effect menu bar entry | The eight most-reached-for: Fast Box Blur, Glow, Brightness & Contrast, Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Grayscale, Sepia, Hue Rotate |
| Dragging an effect from the library onto a layer on canvas | Fastest when you already know what you want |
| The command palette | When you know the name |
Per-effect controls
Each applied effect gets:
- An enable toggle — turn it off without losing its settings.
- Reorder handles.
- Remove.
- One row per parameter.
Keyframing parameters
Numeric parameters are keyframeable like any other property. The stopwatch writes a track under:
effect.<id>.<param>which is sampled per frame into the render snapshot along with everything else. There is nothing second-class about an effect keyframe — it appears in the timeline, in the graph editor and in the Easing panel exactly like a transform keyframe.
Press U on a layer with animated effects and the effect parameter rows appear alongside the transform ones. This is the quickest way to audit what an imported or preset-applied layer is actually doing.
The curve editor
The Curves effect gets a dedicated tone-curve editor:
- Drag a point to move it.
- Click empty space on the curve to add a point.
- Alt-click a point to remove it.
- The endpoints are pinned in X, so the curve always spans the full range.
Special parameter types
Most parameters are numbers, colours or booleans. Two are worth calling out:
- Displacement Map takes a layer parameter — you point it at another layer, whose pixels drive the displacement.
- Channel Mixer exposes the full 12-coefficient matrix plus a monochrome switch.
Effects on groups
An effect applies to the layer it sits on. To apply one to several layers as a unit, you have two options:
- Pre-compose them and put the effect on the pre-comp. The subtree renders to its own framebuffer, so the effect sees the composited group.
- Use an adjustment layer above them, which applies its effects to everything beneath.
Related
- Effect catalog — all 30, with their parameters
- Compositing — blend modes, mattes, motion blur
- Masks & mattes