Fluted Glass Effect
Fluted glass effect for photos and video: rounded ribs split the picture into bent strips with a sheen. Set rib width, angle and tint, free in your browser.
What is fluted glass?
Fluted glass, also sold as reeded or ribbed glass, is pressed with parallel rounded ribs. Each rib works like a long, narrow lens, so whatever's behind the pane breaks into strips that are shifted and squeezed.
The bending is refraction: light changes direction as it goes into the glass and out again. The name comes from fluting in architecture, the rounded grooves running down a classical column.
How to add a fluted glass effect
The tool opens on the Fluted pattern at Scale 40, Refraction 120 and Sheen 0.3, which is strong enough for the strips to read at a glance. Scale sets the width of one flute in pixels of a 1080p frame, and Refraction how strongly the glass bends what's behind it.
Angle turns the ribs: 0 keeps them upright and 90 lays them flat. Frost adds a random scatter that blurs the view, Sheen puts a highlight where the curved surface faces the light, and Tint multiplies a glass color over the view.
The Glass menu has other patterns too: Ripple, Hammered, Glass block and Rain, plus Frosted, which is what Frosted Glass Effect opens on.
Settings for a shower door, a poster background and window blinds
Reeded shower door: Scale 20, Refraction 120 and Frost 4. Narrow ribs at the strongest bend chop shapes into slivers, and the frost softens whatever's left.
Poster or hero background: Scale 120, Refraction 120 and Sheen 0.4 on a bold, colorful photo. Wide ribs bend the picture mostly near their edges, so big shapes stay recognizable while the sheen runs a highlight down each rib.
Window blinds: Angle 90, Scale 36, Refraction 90 and a warm Tint like #f6e6c8, for slats of light across a room.
How the fluted glass is modeled
Each flute has a half-round profile. The tool measures that surface's slope at every pixel and shifts the picture by it, so the view bends most near the edges of each rib, just as it does in real reeded glass.
On a video the ribs stay put while the footage plays on behind them, the way a camera sees a street through a reeded window.
Why do wide flutes look flatter?
The bend grows with Refraction and shrinks with Scale. At the same Refraction, a flute twice as wide shifts the view half as far, so the strips look almost flat.
When you widen the ribs, raise Refraction with them, up to its maximum of 120. If the picture still reads too clearly, add a bit of Frost.
Saving fluted glass without moiré
A GIF gets scaled to 960 px on its long side, and very narrow ribs can shimmer into moiré once they're only a few pixels wide. For a GIF, keep Scale above about 20, or save the clip as MP4.
For a still, PNG keeps the hard edge of every rib. JPG works well for wide ribs over a photo.