Portrait / depth

What this group is for

These effects know there’s a person and there’s a background, and they treat the two differently — fog that thickens with distance, focus that races between planes, parallax that lets the foreground breathe ahead of everything behind it.

Reach here when a flat portrait needs to become a place: a subject standing in atmosphere, a far plane that shimmers or melts while the face stays present and sharp.

The effects

Written up in full: depth-fog — sample frame, parameter table and a downloadable project.

• depth-fog — Atmospheric fog applied per layer, dimming and lifting luma more the further back a plane sits. Use it to drop a subject into haze and instant distance.
• rack-focus-ascii — The character ramp narrows around focusDepth: detail where it’s in focus, posterised where it isn’t. Best for a deliberate, cinematic pull between near and far.
• depth-spotlight — A radial XY mask multiplied by a gaussian over depth, carving a sharp cone of light at a chosen distance. Use it to isolate one plane like a stage light.
• z-shimmer — A pulse whose phase shifts per layer, so the foreground stays stable while far planes shimmer with electronic life. Great for an unsettled, charged background.
• z-melt — Far planes erode — ramp skip, ink dropout and alpha drop all scaled by depth. Use it to dissolve the world behind a subject into nothing.
• depth-ladder-reveal — The reveal steps through depth instead of XY: each plane appears at its own progress threshold. Best for a build-on that walks from far to near.
• depth-scan-stairs — A horizontal scan whose position is delayed by depth, sweeping through the scene like a CT slice. Use it for a clinical, layer-by-layer pass.
• depth-freeze — Planes past a depth cut sample a held history frame while the foreground plays live. Great for freezing a backdrop around a moving subject.
• backplate-recovery-glow — Stylises low-confidence regions with a veil, palette clamp and soft glow so extraction holes read as atmosphere. Use it to turn imperfect mattes into mood.
• depth-rim-separation — An edge rim whose palette shifts with depth: near white, mid cyan, far amber or green. Best for lifting a figure cleanly off its background.
• depth-refraction — A small per-cell sampling offset driven by the local depth gradient. Use it for a subtle glassy warp along the edges of planes.
• interplane-bleed — Colour and characters leak from the neighbouring depth plane, like stacked sheets of glass. Great for a layered, slightly smeared diorama feel.
• split-diopter — Two focus bands in one pass: near and far stay sharp while the middle poster-crushes. Use it for the classic impossible-both-in-focus shot.
• depth-parallax — A per-layer 2D pan offset scaled by (1−d), so the foreground moves more than the background. Best for adding believable motion to a still portrait.
• layer-peel — A scale-up and highlight on the layer whose depth sits near a peel depth. Use it to lift one plane forward and call attention to it.
• card-stack — Per-layer translate and rotate so the scene reads like a stack of paper cards. Great for a tactile, hand-arranged composition.
• diorama-bend — A perspective bend that strengthens further back, for a cardboard-diorama feel. Use it to make the world curl into a little stage.
• depth-hinge — Each plane rotates around its own pivot with a mid and far bias — card-stack motion with weighted swing. Best for a hinged, opening-book reveal.
• parallax-counterspin — A gentle per-plane counter-rotation around a centre depth: near turns one way, far the other. Use it for slow, hypnotic depth motion.

How to reach for it

These live under the Portrait / depth group in the Inspector’s effect stack, and they need a depth pass to work — run Person extraction from the Inspector or import a pre-baked depth layer first. Every effect here is fully maskable, so you can confine the atmosphere to exactly the part of the frame that should hold space.