Holographic Foil Effect
Holographic foil effect for images and video: rainbow bands that slide as if tipped in the light, plus glints of glitter. Seeded, so every export matches.
What makes holographic foil shine in rainbow colors?
Holographic foil has a pattern of microscopic grooves that works as a diffraction grating. White light hitting the grooves splits into its colors, and which color reaches your eye depends on the angle, so the foil runs through the rainbow as it moves.
It's a kind of iridescence, in the same family as soap bubbles and oil on water, although those get their colors from thin films instead of grooves. Printers press the foil onto paper and plastic by hot stamping, also called foil stamping.
How the foil follows your picture
The rainbow is laid down as bands across the frame, then bent by the picture's own lights and darks and by a slow ripple in the foil. So the color follows the shapes underneath instead of running in straight stripes.
The foil is added as light, with more of it in dark areas than in highlights, so faces and lettering stay readable. Glints are a scatter of small cells that flash one after another as the bands pass.
How to add a holographic foil effect to a photo or video
Open any photo or video. Amount sets how strong the foil is, Bands how many times the rainbow repeats across the frame, and Angle which way the bands lie, in degrees.
Warp sets how far the picture bends the bands, Glitter how many glints there are, and Speed how fast the bands slide (at 0 they hold still). Seed gives you a different scatter of glints and ripples.
The presets go from Subtle, a light sheen, to Prism's tight straight bands, Glitter, and Oil slick, which is one broad warped band drifting slowly.
Settings for a trading card shine, an oil slick and foil lettering
For the shine of a rare trading card, start from Prism, turn Angle to about 60 so the tight bands cross the card at a slant, and bring Amount up to 0.8.
Oil slick, one wide band with Warp at 1 and Speed at 0.2, drifts slowly through a dark picture like fuel on a puddle. At that speed its cycle takes 40 seconds, longer than any clip on this page, so raise Speed to 0.4 to get a 20-second loop.
Foil collects on dark areas, so dark letters on a pale background pick up more of it than light letters on black. Set the type dark gray, Amount to 0.9 and Bands to 3. Then the Holographic Sticker Maker can cut the result out with a white border.
Why do the bands run in straight stripes across my picture?
Warp bends the bands by the picture's light and dark, and a picture that's one flat tone gives it nothing to work with. Raise Warp toward 1, or use a photo with clear lights and shadows. The foil's own gentle ripple will still curve them a little.
A high Bands value, like Prism's, reads as stripes too, since the same bend moves a narrow band a shorter distance.
Saving foil as a still or a clip
The rainbow is a smooth sweep of hues, and a GIF's palette of 256 colors breaks it into visible steps, so moving foil is best saved as MP4 or WebM. With Glitter at 0 the bands repeat every 8 divided by Speed seconds, and a recording of exactly that length loops cleanly. For a still, PNG keeps the most detail.