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.
The GPU, and the six that bake
Since 0.7, 177 of the 183 effects are shaders on the render graph, so a stack
of effects on footage plays at full speed and costs what a colour matrix
costs. Six still bake on the CPU because they are generators without a
shader form yet — Vegas, Numbers, Timecode, Audio Spectrum, Audio Waveform
and Lightning. When one of them is on the current frame the viewport HUD
shows a cpu fx row naming it, which is the cue that a slow frame is that
effect rather than the stack.
Related
- Effect catalog — all 30, with their parameters
- Compositing — blend modes, mattes, motion blur
- Masks & mattes