Frosted Glass Effect
Frosted glass effect for photos and video: colors stay, detail melts into a fine, grainy haze, like etched glass. Seeded frost keeps every export identical.
What is frosted glass?
Frosted glass is clear glass that's been sandblasted or acid etched on one side. The pitted surface scatters the light going through it, so shapes blur away while light and color still get through.
Screen design borrowed the look and called it glassmorphism: semi-transparent panels over a blurred, colorful background.
How to make a frosted glass effect
The Frosted preset sets the Glass menu to Frosted, with Scale 120, Refraction 10, Frost 10 and Sheen 0.1. Push Frost up, as far as 30, for a thicker pane, or lower it to keep shapes readable.
Scale sets the size of the bumps in the surface, and Refraction how strongly they bend the view. Sheen adds highlights where the surface catches the light, Tint multiplies a glass color over the view, and Seed rearranges the frost. If you want ribbed glass in place of an etched pane, Fluted Glass Effect opens on the same controls.
Settings for a glassmorphism panel, a bathroom window and light frost
Glassmorphism panel: Frost 20, Refraction 0, Sheen 0 and Tint #f2fbff. Then open Mix and set Mask to Rectangle over the area where a caption will go. Only that panel frosts, and the photo stays sharp around it.
Bathroom window: Frost 30, Scale 60 and Refraction 60. Faces and text dissolve, but the colors of what's behind still come through.
Morning frost: Frost 4 and Sheen 0.2. Detail softens slightly and the picture picks up a faint sparkle.
Why is frosted glass grainy instead of smooth?
A Gaussian blur averages each pixel smoothly with its neighbors. This effect models the glass itself. A noise-shaped surface bends the view slightly, and Frost scatters each pixel by sampling four random points around it, which leaves the fine grain of etched glass.
The scatter is seeded, so on a video the grain stays in place instead of crawling. For a smooth haze, there's a Gaussian blur on the Blur, Light & Glow Effects hub.
Saving frosted glass
The grain is different at every pixel, and that's the hardest thing for a compressor to store. A PNG keeps it exactly but comes out large. A JPG at default quality smooths part of it away, which can end up looking closer to real etched glass.
For a video, set Quality to High so the grain doesn't break up into smeared blocks.