depth-bands mask
A slice of distance. A soft gaussian band floats at a chosen depth, so an effect can settle on the foreground, the middle, or the far air alone.
What it’s for
A landscape painter cools and softens everything as it recedes — atmospheric perspective, the haze that tells your eye how far away a ridge is. The depth-bands mask lets you grade by distance the same way. A gaussian band sits at a point in depth and selects only the things living at that range; everything nearer and farther falls away.
center places the band — 0 is hard
foreground, 1 is the far plane. halfWidth sets
how thick the slice is, from a single subject to a whole
mid-ground. softness feathers the front and back
of the band so the transition reads as air, not a cut.
Reach for this when: you want a different effect dose per near, mid and far; the background to drift cool and hazy while the subject stays warm; a glitch that only touches what is close. Note this needs a depth pass — it only works on depth-aware layers.
Where it lives in the app
Add from the Masks panel. The mask appears as its own layer
on the timeline; assign it to one or more effects by setting
their target to point at this mask layer.
Parameters
| Key | Range | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
center | 0–1 | 0.5 | Band centre (0 = foreground) |
halfWidth | 0–1 | 0.2 | Band half-width |
softness | 0–1 | 0.1 | Feather |
Pairs well with
- color grade — push the far band cool and the near band warm, and the frame gains real depth out of nothing but distance.
- blur / defocus — soften only the background slice for a rack-focus look that never touches the subject.
- film grain — heavier texture in the far air, like haze settling on the horizon.
- chromatic aberration — colour fringing keyed to the background reads as atmospheric scatter rather than a glitch.