plnty-fx

On the rail as plnty-fx.

When to use it

Treat ONE picture or ONE clip that already exists in layers, bottom first: a Grade, film, print, dither and type, artifacts and vision, each at its own strength and with its own mask, rendered free in the browser.

When to reach for something else

It treats what it is given and generates nothing, so it cannot add or remove a subject, change a composition, or invent a picture. It takes a still just as readily as a clip; do not ask for a clip when a still is what was selected.

How to use it

1. Use the card’s Source area. The picture or clip to treat. Add looks as layers, each with its own strength and mask.
2. Set Color Wheels, Exposure, Saturation, Contrast, Pop, Boost on the card.
3. Add looks as layers, each at its own strength. The looks are listed below.
4. Press Run.

On the card

Control	What it does	Choices
Source	The picture or clip to treat. Add looks as layers, each with its own strength and mask.
Color Wheels	Three color wheels that tint the dark areas, the mid-tones, and the bright areas separately.
Exposure	Overall brightness.	-2 to 2
Saturation	How vivid the colors are.	-1 to 1
Contrast	The gap between the darks and the brights.	-1 to 1
Pop	Adds local contrast to make the image punchier.	0 to 1
Boost	Lifts the overall vibrancy.	0 to 1
Run	Starts the run. The number on it is what this run costs in credits, worked out before you press.

Looks

Each look is a layer you add to the stack on the card, with its own strength and mask.

last-pass

Film grain and lens fringing in one pass, the last thing that happens to a picture before you see it. Both run in the grade shader, so they stay live while you drag.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Grain Intensity	How much film-like grain to add.	0 to 1
Grain Size	How coarse the film grain is.	0.5 to 4
Color Grain	Makes the grain colored instead of plain gray.	On or off
Chromatic Aberration	A lens effect that fringes edges with slight color, like an old camera.	0 to 1
Aberration Edge Mask	Keeps that color-fringe effect mostly at the edges of the frame.	0 to 1

glow

Light spilling past where the optics should have stopped it. Threshold the bright areas, blur them wide, screen them back. Blur everything and you get haze; blur only what was bright and the light appears to come from somewhere.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Threshold	How bright a pixel must be before it starts to glow. Higher keeps the glow on highlights only.	0 to 1
Radius	How far the glow spreads from a bright area, in pixels.	1 to 80
Strength	How intense the glow is where it appears.	0 to 2.5
Spread	Shape of the falloff. Low keeps it tight to the source, high hazes the whole frame.	0.2 to 2
Tint	Colour the glow takes on, regardless of the colour underneath it.	Any colour

vhs

Tape fails at colour long before brightness, because chroma was recorded at a fraction of luma bandwidth. Colour smears sideways while detail stays put. Get that one thing right and the rest is decoration.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Chroma bleed	How far colour smears sideways from an edge, the way tape loses chroma.	1 to 40
Tracking	Horizontal drift and tearing, as if the tape is not sitting straight on the head.	0 to 1.5
Scanlines	Darkness of the horizontal line pattern a CRT leaves across the picture.	0 to 1
Tape noise	How much speckled tape noise sits over the image. It re-rolls every frame.	0 to 1.5
Head switching	Strength of the torn band along the very bottom, where a VCR switches heads.	0 to 1
Seed	Changes the random pattern without changing its amount. Move it if the noise sits badly.	1 to 200

film-stock

Analogue emulsion response. A tone curve that lifts and tints the black floor, compresses highlights instead of clipping them, plus luma-weighted grain and halation around anything bright.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Stock	Which film the picture is emulated on. Each carries its own colour, contrast and grain.	Color 200, Gold Flash, Portra Soft, Cine Tungsten, Expired Color, Ektar Pop, B&W 400, Silver Gelatin, Disposable Date, Super 8, Night Emulsion
Grain character	Character of the grain, from fine and even to the coarse clumps of a pushed stock.	Fine, Classic, Coarse, Pushed
Grain	How much grain sits over the picture. It re-rolls every frame, as a real exposure would.	0 to 2
Halation	The red bloom real film gives around bright highlights.	0 to 2
Saturation	How strong the colours are.	0 to 2
Contrast	Distance between the darkest and lightest tones.	0 to 2
Fade	Lifts the blacks toward grey, the way old prints lose their shadows.	0 to 2
Exposure	Overall brightness, as stops over or under.	-1 to 1
Warmth	Pushes the whole picture toward orange or toward blue.	-1 to 1
Tint	Pushes the whole picture toward green or toward magenta.	-1 to 1
Black point	Where the darkest tone sits. Raise it for a milky shadow, lower it to crush.	-1 to 1
Vignette	How much the corners fall off into darkness.	0 to 1
Grain seed	Changes the grain pattern without changing its amount.	1 to 999

grain

The grain engine without the tone curve, for images already graded elsewhere. Weighted so it lives in shadows and midtones and fades out of highlights, which is what separates grain from noise.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Amount	How much grain lands on the picture.	0 to 2.5
Grain size	How coarse each grain is.	0.4 to 4
Colour speckle	How much the grain carries colour rather than staying neutral.	0 to 1.5
Shadow bias	How much more the shadows take than the highlights, the way emulsion does.	0 to 1
Seed	Which roll of the grain you get. Change it for a different pattern at the same settings.	1 to 999

aberration

Red samples from one side, blue from the other, green stays put. Green has to stay because the eye reads it as position; displace green and the picture just looks moved. Offset grows toward the frame edge like real lens aberration.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Separation	How far the colour channels separate, in pixels.	0 to 30
Vertical bias	Whether the fringe leans up or down as well as sideways.	-1 to 1
Edge falloff	How much the fringe grows toward the edges and stays clean in the centre.	0 to 1

slit-scan

A camera exposing one slit at a time while the subject moves, so one axis becomes time instead of space. A still has no time axis, so each line is displaced by its own average tone: bright lines lag, dark ones race ahead.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Shear	How far rows slide out of place, in pixels. This is the size of the smear.	0 to 250
Wave	Bends the displacement into a wave instead of a straight ramp.	0 to 2
Smear	Stretches each displaced row so it reads as motion blur rather than a clean cut.	0 to 1
Scan axis	Whether the scan runs across the frame or down it.	Rows, Columns

gradient

Tone remapped onto a three-stop ramp. The useful control is repeat: wrapping the ramp several times across the tonal range turns smooth gradients into hard contour bands, which two-point duotone cannot do.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Ramp shift	Slides the whole ramp brighter or darker, changing which tones get which colour.	-1 to 1
Repeat	How many times the three colours cycle across the tonal range. Above one it posterises into bands.	1 to 8
Shadow	Colour the darkest tones become.	Any colour
Mid	Colour the midtones become.	Any colour
Highlight	Colour the brightest tones become.	Any colour

newsprint

Coarse toner on cheap absorbent stock. Tone is cut by a threshold that several octaves of noise push around, so the result blotches the way bleeding ink does instead of forming a regular dot grid.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Grain scale	Size of the halftone pattern. Larger is a cheaper, coarser press.	1 to 10
Press decay	How worn the press run is, from a clean first copy to a tired late one.	0 to 1
Contrast	Distance between the darkest and lightest tones before screening.	0 to 1
Toner starve	Starves the ink supply, thinning the darks toward grey.	0 to 1
Highlight burn	How early the highlights blow out to bare paper.	0 to 1
Shadow flood	How early the shadows flood to solid ink.	0 to 1
Paper texture	How much of the paper surface shows through the ink.	0 to 1
Ink	Colour of the ink the page is printed in.	Black, Red, Blue, Sepia

ink-press

Letterpress. Relief type pushed into soft paper under uneven pressure, so ink density follows the bed and fine detail fills in and disappears before anything else happens.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Detail held	How much fine detail survives the press. Lower reduces the picture to broad shapes.	0 to 1
Pressure variance	How unevenly the plate presses, so some areas take more ink than others.	0 to 1
Coverage	How much ink is laid down overall.	0.2 to 1.5
Ink bleed	How far ink creeps outward into the paper fibres.	0 to 1
Paper tooth	Roughness of the paper surface fighting the ink.	0 to 1
Paper texture	How much of the paper surface shows through the ink.	0 to 1
Ink	Colour of the ink.	Any colour
Paper	Colour of the sheet.	Any colour

offset

Four-colour process printing. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black screens at 15, 75, 0 and 45 degrees, which is the angle set that produces a rosette instead of moire. Dot area scales with ink coverage.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Screen ruling	Screen ruling, the size of one halftone dot cell. Larger dots read as cheaper printing.	3 to 16
Ink weight	How much ink each dot carries, which sets how dark the print runs.	0.3 to 1.6
Highlight cutoff	How early the highlights drop out to bare paper.	0 to 0.5
Misregistration	How far the colour plates sit out of alignment, the classic offset fringe.	0 to 1.5
Screen rotation	Rotation of the halftone screen, in degrees.	0 to 90
Paper texture	How much of the paper surface shows through the ink.	0 to 1
Paper	Colour of the sheet.	Any colour

linocut

Relief block printing. The surface either holds ink or is cut away, so midtones become carved hatching whose line spacing carries the tone. The cuts wander, because a hand made them.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Cut depth	How deep the gouge runs, which sets how much ink each cut removes.	0.1 to 1.6
Hatch spacing	Distance between hatch lines in pixels. Tighter hatching reads darker.	4 to 30
Hand wobble	How much the cuts wander, the sign of a hand holding the tool.	0 to 2.5
Tool chatter	Chatter left by the tool skipping across the block.	0 to 1
Paper texture	How much of the paper surface shows through the ink.	0 to 1
Ink	Colour of the ink.	Any colour
Paper	Colour of the sheet.	Any colour

raster

The pen is down where the image is dark and lifts where it lightens, so tone becomes the length and thickness of unbroken runs rather than the density of marks. Reads as a plotter, not a screen.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Line spacing	Distance between drawn lines in pixels. Tighter spacing holds more detail.	2 to 24
Line weight	Thickness of each line.	0.2 to 2
Pen-down point	How dark an area must be before the pen touches down. Higher leaves more paper bare.	0 to 0.9
Wander	How much each line wanders off straight, as a hand would.	0 to 2
Ink	Colour the lines are drawn in.	Any colour
Paper	Colour of the sheet behind them.	Any colour

ordered

A Bayer matrix holds 0..15 arranged so each rising threshold switches on the most spread-out cell available. That ordering is why a fixed repeating pattern reads as even tone. The visible grid is the point.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Pixel size	Size of one dithered pixel. Larger reads as a coarser, older display.	1 to 12
Exposure	Which tones get filled. Higher leaves the lighter areas empty.	0 to 1
Matrix	Size of the repeating threshold grid. 4 is chunky and obvious, 8 is finer.	4x4, 8x8
Ink	Colour of the filled pixels.	Any colour
Paper	Colour behind them.	Any colour

blue-noise

Dithering with the grid removed. Dot position, size and threshold are all jittered per cell, so tone emerges with no repeating structure and no moire against image detail.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Cell size	Spacing of the dot grid in pixels.	3 to 24
Dot size	Size of each dot relative to its cell.	0.3 to 2
Scatter	How far dots wander off the grid, which is what keeps the pattern from looking mechanical.	0 to 1.4
Exposure	Which tones get dots. Higher leaves the lighter areas empty.	0 to 1
Ink	Colour of the dots.	Any colour
Paper	Colour behind them.	Any colour

ember

Ordered dither onto a heat ramp, with bloom computed from the dithered result rather than the source. That is the difference between coals throwing their own light and a soft glow with a pattern laid over it.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Cell size	Size of one dither cell in pixels.	1 to 12
Heat	How hot the palette runs, pushing embers from dull red toward white.	0.2 to 3
Bias	Shifts the whole picture brighter or darker before it is dithered.	-0.5 to 0.5
Bloom	How much the hottest cells bleed light into their neighbours.	0 to 2
Bloom radius	How far that bleed reaches, in pixels.	1 to 40

bit-field

Every cell becomes a horizontal bar whose height encodes local darkness, with each row sheared sideways. The picture turns into a readout.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Cell size	Size of one cell in pixels.	2 to 24
Bar weight	Thickness of the bars inside each cell.	0.2 to 1.8
Row shear	Shifts whole rows sideways, breaking the grid into something more like a readout.	0 to 1
Cutoff	How dark an area must be before any bar is drawn at all.	0 to 0.6
Ink	Colour of the bars.	Any colour
Ground	Colour of the ground behind them.	Any colour

pixel-paint

Quantised to a small palette on a grid with the cell outlines left showing. The palette choice is the whole effect: a fixed set imposes a mood, deriving it from the image keeps the character but flattens it. Two different tools, hence a mode.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Cell size	Size of one painted block in pixels.	3 to 48
Palette size	How many colours the picture is reduced to.	2 to 8
Cell outline	Darkness of the border drawn around each block.	0 to 1
Palette	Where the colours come from. Image reads them from your own picture.	Pastel, Neon, Earth, From image

LCD

A monochrome dot-matrix display on tinted glass. Two pixel states and nothing between, but the unlit cells stay faintly visible, which is what says old handset instead of modern OLED.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Pixel pitch	Size of one panel cell in pixels. Small looks like a dense screen, large like a scoreboard.	2 to 24
Cell gap	Width of the dark grid between cells.	0 to 0.7
Contrast	How hard the picture is pushed toward fully lit or fully unlit cells.	0.2 to 4
Bias	Shifts the whole panel toward lit or unlit before contrast is applied.	-0.5 to 0.5
Unlit cells	How visible the unlit cells are, the faint grid you see on a switched-off display.	0 to 0.6
Lit	Colour of a lit cell.	Any colour
Panel	Colour of the panel behind the cells.	Any colour

tapestry

Pictorial weaving from a finite set of dyed yarns. To fake a colour between two yarns a weaver alternates them row by row, which is why tapestry gradients look striped rather than smooth. Blending instead of hatching loses the whole character.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Thread pitch	Spacing of the threads in pixels. Tighter weave holds more detail.	3 to 30
Yarn count	How many yarn colours the picture is woven from.	2 to 8
Hatching	How strongly threads cross-hatch to build up darker areas.	0 to 1
Warp ribbing	Raised ridges running along the warp, the ribbed feel of woven cloth.	0 to 1.5
Yarn fuzz	How hairy the yarn looks at its edges.	0 to 1.5
Yarns	Which set of yarn colours is used.	Folk, Medieval, Indigo, Natural wool

ASCII

One glyph per cell from a density ramp. The ramp has to be ordered by actual ink coverage rather than by what looks darker, or the tonal response goes non-monotonic and the eye catches it instantly.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Cell size	Size of one character cell in pixels. Smaller fits more characters and holds more detail.	4 to 32
Contrast	How hard the picture is pushed toward the densest and sparsest characters.	0.2 to 3
Glyph colour	Whether characters are drawn in one ink colour or take the colour underneath them.	Single colour, Sampled
Polarity	Whether light characters sit on a dark ground or dark ones on a light ground.	Light on dark, Dark on light
Ink	Colour the characters are drawn in.	Any colour
Ground	Colour behind the characters.	Any colour

vision

A machine looking at your picture and marking what it finds: points on the busiest cells, ties between the close ones, corner brackets, tracking boxes and coordinate readouts. Nothing is recognised. What gets marked is where the picture has the most going on, which is most of why it reads as analysis.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Looking for	Which signal the scan hunts for before it marks anything.	Detail, Contrast, Edges, Highlights, Shadows
Threshold	How strong a cell must score before it earns a mark. Higher marks less.	0 to 1
Points	Upper limit on how many marks the frame can carry.	8 to 120
Spacing	Smallest gap allowed between two marks. Raise it to stop them clumping on one edge.	10 to 90
Links	How many ties get drawn between nearby marks. Zero leaves them unconnected.	0 to 100
Labels	How many coordinate readouts appear beside the marks. Zero turns them off.	0 to 100
Brackets	How often a mark gets a pair of corner brackets around it.	0 to 100
Tracking boxes	How many tracking boxes hold onto the busiest regions. Zero turns them off.	0 to 4
Re-reads per second	How often the overlay re-reads the picture per second. Low gives the stutter of a slow detector.	1 to 30
Line weight	Thickness of every stroke and the size of the readout type.	0.3 to 3
Readout size	Size of the coordinate readouts. Independent of stroke weight, so fine type over heavy marks is reachable.	0.5 to 3
Dash	Breaks the tracking box strokes into dashes. Zero draws them solid.	0 to 24
Halo	Strength of the contrasting ring drawn under everything. It keeps the overlay readable over footage it was never tuned against.	0 to 1
Blend	How the overlay meets the picture. Screen and Add glow, Multiply sits in, Difference inverts whatever is underneath.	Normal, Screen, Add, Multiply, Difference
Mark ink	Colour of the marks: points, ties and brackets.	Any colour
Readout ink	Colour of the readouts: tracking boxes and every coordinate label.	Any colour
Seed	Changes which marks are picked and what they say, without changing how many.	1 to 200

glyphs

Monospace glyphs scattered over the picture rather than in place of it: random characters in random cells, most where the tone sits a third of the way up from black and thinning toward both ends, so they gather in shadows and on edges. On a clip the field re-rolls on a tick and holds between.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Column width	Width of one character column in pixels. The row is a third taller. Match it across layers and their grids line up.	8 to 48
Density	How full the cells get where the characters gather most. They thin out from there toward black and white.	0 to 1
Gather at	The brightness the characters gather around, 0 black to 1 white. The reference sits about a third of the way up.	0 to 1
Spread	How far from that brightness characters still appear, thinning out toward the edge of the range. 1 reaches everything.	0.05 to 1
Glyphs	Which characters the cells draw from. The first set is the one the studio reference clip uses.	M X H S I 8 4 0 # / _, Digits, Binary, Letters, # % @ * + =
Ink	Colour the characters are drawn in.	Any colour
Re-roll (Hz)	How many times a second the field re-rolls on a clip. 0 freezes it; 24 holds each roll for a few frames.	0 to 60
Seed	Which roll you get on a still. Change it for a different scatter at the same settings.	1 to 200

stretch

Inside patches of the grid, each column holds one column of the picture across its whole width: stripes that keep every vertical gradient intact while the horizontal detail collapses. Coverage decides how much of the frame breaks; a matte decides where.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Grid	Width of one stripe in pixels, on the same grid the other treatments use.	8 to 48
Axis	Whether each column holds one column of the picture, or each row holds one row.	Columns, Rows
Coverage	How much of the frame breaks into stripes. 1 stripes the whole picture; a matte decides where.	0 to 1
Patch height	How many rows tall each broken patch is.	1 to 6
Re-roll (Hz)	How many times a second the patches re-roll on a clip. 0 freezes them.	0 to 60
Seed	Which patches break on a still. Change it for a different set at the same coverage.	1 to 200

tiles

Rectangles of the grid show the picture one whole tile out of place, hard-edged and untinted, the way a block of a broken stream lands where the previous one belonged. Because the tile and its jump both sit on the grid, a soft edge inside one becomes a step.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Intensity	How much of the treatment shows over the graded picture.	0 to 1
Grid	Width of one grid column in pixels. Tiles are whole columns wide and snap to it.	8 to 48
Tile height	How many rows tall each tile is. The jump is the same number of cells.	1 to 6
Tiles	How many tiles break per frame, scaled to the picture so the look holds at any size.	0 to 1
Shift	The furthest a tile can jump, in whole tiles.	1 to 6
Direction	Whether tiles jump up and down, sideways, or either.	Up and down, Sideways, Both
Re-roll (Hz)	How many times a second the tiles re-roll on a clip. 0 freezes them.	0 to 60
Seed	Which tiles break on a still. Change it for a different set at the same amount.	1 to 200

grad.js

Estimate depth from your picture, then wash a gradient through it. Hands back a looping clip, not a still.

Settings this mode adds:

Setting	What it does	Choices
Gradient	The colours that wash through the scene. Pick a preset or drag the stops.
Gradient Blend	How strongly the gradient recolors the image, from subtle tint to full recolor.	0 to 100
Depth Contrast	Stretches the depth range. Higher values flatten the near and far areas into solid color bands.	50 to 240
Depth Gamma	Shifts the gradient toward the near or far parts of the scene.	40 to 220
Gradient Repeats	How many times the gradient repeats across the depth range.	25 to 400
Motion Speed	How fast the colors flow through the scene.	0 to 200
Motion	Cycle washes colors one direction; Bounce eases them back and forth.	Cycle, Bounce
Color Blend	How colors mix between stops. Natural is smoothest; Bright is more vivid; Basic is the simplest.	Natural, Bright, Basic
Blend Mode	How the gradient combines with the original image.	Normal, Screen, Multiply, Overlay
Depth Softness	Blurs the depth map to soften hard edges between color bands.	0 to 8
Keep Brightness	Preserves the original image’s light and shadow under the gradient color.	0 to 100
Invert Depth	Swaps which end of the gradient maps to near vs far.	On or off
Smooth Banding	Adds fine noise to hide visible steps between gradient colors.	On or off
Loop Length (s)	Length of the exported looping video in seconds.	1 to 30
Frame Rate	Frames per second in the exported video.	24 fps, 30 fps, 48 fps, 60 fps
Export Size	Longest-side resolution of the exported video.	HD, Full HD, QHD, 4K