image mask
A stencil cut by hand. Bring in any image — a brushstroke, a logo, a letter you painted somewhere else — and its grayscale becomes the region the frame obeys.
What it’s for
Before there were procedural masks there were gobos — metal stencils slid in front of a stage light to throw a shape onto the set: a window, a forest, a word. The image mask is the digital gobo. Drop in any picture and its grayscale luminance becomes the mask: white passes the effect through, black holds it back, grey feathers.
You shape the response with three handles.
low sets the black point of the image map and
high the white point, so you can clip a sloppy
scan into a clean cut. gamma bends everything
between — soften a hard-edged logo, or harden a smudged
charcoal sketch into a crisp boundary.
Reach for this when: you want a region shaped exactly like your own lettering; an effect that lives inside a hand-drawn shape; a brand mark that gates a glitch pass; anything you can paint in another tool and want to wear as a stencil.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
low | 0–1 | 0 | Black point of the image map |
high | 0–1 | 1 | White point |
gamma | 0.1–4 | 1 | Curve |
Pairs well with
- text-glitch — confine the breakdown to the shape of a hand-painted word. The letterform itself becomes the thing that’s falling apart.
- chromatic aberration — colour fringing inside a logo only. A brand mark that looks like it’s vibrating off the screen.
- phosphor CRT glow — a painted shape that glows like neon left on overnight.
- scanlines — interference trapped inside your stencil, as if the shape were a screen within the screen.