phosphor

For the screen someone has been staring at for hours. The light that stays on the glass a beat after the thing that made it is gone.

Open the editor Download .cinerune project

phosphor sample frame rendered from the bundled demo project — A real frame exported from the bundled `demo.cinerune` — phosphor over Cinerune’s code-assembly plate.

What it’s for

Old monitors didn’t cut to black; they let go slowly. A bright glyph would burn its shape into the phosphor and the ghost of it would hang there, fading, while the next frame drew over the top. phosphor rebuilds that physics — every bright cell leaves a tinted trail behind it that decays over the following frames, so motion smears into a comet of light instead of snapping cleanly.

This is the texture of fatigue and of analog time. A radar sweep. A cursor blinking in a dark room at 4am. The HUD of a machine that’s been running too long. Reach for this when: you want stillness to feel like exhaustion and motion to feel like it costs something. A short depth with fast decay is a crisp, healthy tube; a long depth with decay near 0.95 is a burned-in screen that’s never been turned off.

The default tint leans toward the cool green of a vector display, but the three tint channels let you walk it anywhere — sodium-amber for a terminal, sickly cyan for something medical, pushed-red for an alarm state.

Where it lives in the app

Effects tray, group Brightness & alpha. Add it to any layer; it accumulates across frames, so it reads best on moving content. Gate it with a mask layer to keep the afterglow on a single element while the rest of the frame stays instant.

Parameters

Key	Range	Default	Effect
`depth`	1–16	8	Trail length in frames
`decay`	0.3–0.95	0.85	How slowly the ghost fades
`tintR`	0–255	120	Afterglow tint, red
`tintG`	0–255	255	Afterglow tint, green
`tintB`	0–255	150	Afterglow tint, blue

Pairs well with

text-glitch — the after-image a real arcade monitor leaves on the eye. Together they read like a screen you stared at for hours.
palette quantize (Green) — lock the colour to phosphor green and the trail stops being an effect and becomes the actual hardware.
twirl — let the vortex smear and the afterglow turns the spin into a long-exposure of a fairground at night.
code-rain-mask — the rain stops looking clean and starts looking tired, like a console nobody has slept in front of.

Demo project

The downloadable demo.cinerune is this single effect applied to Cinerune’s bundled code-assembly plate — an amber procedural portrait — animated enough that the trail has something to chase. Drop it into the editor (File → Open from disk…) to tweak parameters live. The frame shown above is exported from the same project.