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Chromatic

Chromatic displacement: a map layer acts as a height field whose slopes push the image around, splitting it into spectral fringes as it moves — think heat-warped glass, energy fields, or stylized refraction.

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Version 0.3.0
Parameters 15
GPU On the GPU (Metal), with a CPU fallback. Nothing to configure.
Hosts After Effects 2020 or later (2025 or later recommended). macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel.

Chromatic is displacement with a prism in it. A map layer acts as a height field whose slopes push the image around, and everything that moves splits into spectral fringes on the way — heat-warped glass, energy fields, stylized refraction. It does the warp and the color break in one pass, and the color break is what sells the warp as glass instead of as a smear.

The map defaults to the layer itself, so the effect bites the moment you apply it: the image distorts along its own contours. Point Map at another layer — an animated noise precomp, a luminance plate, a soft radial ramp — and that layer’s structure becomes the shape of the distortion. If the map layer carries its own effects, precompose it first; the effect reads the layer, not the layer’s effect stack.

Brightness is not displacement — slope is. A flat white region of the map pushes nothing no matter how bright it is, because what moves the image is the gradient between values — the steep parts of the map do all the work and the plateaus sit still. That is why Soften Map is a shaping dial and not a cleanup dial: blurring the height field widens every ramp and flattens every cliff, spreading the push over a larger area at lower force. And because the spectral split rides the displacement, where nothing moves nothing splits — the fringe concentrates exactly where the distortion is strongest, which is where a real piece of glass would fringe too.

The rest of the panel is the width and color of that split. Displace Spread sets how far apart the channels fan, Spread Chroma how much color survives in the fan, Chroma Tint biases the color of the fan, and Spread Quality is the fidelity of the fan at whatever width you chose. Two macro dials sit over all of it, folded along the two seams that matter: Master Amount rides the three displacement dials together, Master Scale rides Displace Spread and Soften Map. Push on one slider, field size on the other — no single dial carries all five.

Parameters

The map

Everything starts with the height field. Map defaults to the layer itself — apply Chromatic to a title or a plate and it distorts along its own luminance contours, which is often exactly what you want for edge fringing. Point it at another layer for real control: animated noise for heat and energy fields, a soft radial ramp for a lens-like bulge, a shape layer for a hard-edged panel of refraction. A map layer that carries its own effects has to be precomposed first, because the effect reads the layer as it sits in the timeline.

Map Behavior fits a map that isn’t the size of the comp. Center places it at its own size in the middle of the frame, Stretch To Fit scales it to fill, and Tile repeats it across the frame — the one to reach for when the map is a small seamless tile whose feature size you want to preserve.

Map Alpha sets how a map with transparency is read. Normal and Premultiplied both honor the alpha and differ in how the color was combined with it; Ignore Alpha discards it and uses the RGB across the whole frame, which is the setting for a map whose alpha is incidental and would otherwise punch a hole in the distortion.

Soften Map blurs the height field before its slopes are measured, and it is the single biggest lever on whether the result reads as glass or as an artifact. The default of 5 is enough to take the aliasing off a moderately clean map. Push Soften Map 10–25 when the map has hard edges — text, shape layers, keyed mattes — because a cliff in the height field produces a tearing seam where a ramp produces a lens. Come back down toward Soften Map = 0 only when the map is already smooth and you want every fine detail pushing.

Displacement

Uniform Displacement decides how you steer the push. Leave it on — the default — and one dial does everything: Displace Amount scales the slope-driven offset on both axes at once, positive riding the gradient one way and negative pulling it back the other. That is the mode for anything that should read as physical, because the direction comes from the map’s shape rather than from you.

Turn Uniform Displacement off and Displace X and Displace Y weight the axes independently. Displace X = 40 against Displace Y = 0 confines the push to the horizontal: the image shears sideways and nothing rides up or down, which is anamorphic, banner-like, and the fastest route to a distortion that respects a horizon. Reversing the sign on one axis and not the other is how the shear starts to look like it’s being drawn inward instead of blown outward.

How hard you push decides how the shot reads. Displace Amount 5–20 is a refractive edge a viewer registers without noticing; 40–80 is warping you clearly mean them to see; past 150 the image is being torn and you’re working abstract. Both Displace X and Displace Y run the same territory on their own axis.

Note that the effect ships neutral: Displace Amount defaults to 0, and because the spectral split rides the displacement, an untouched instance hands the frame back unchanged. With Uniform Displacement on out of the box, Displace Amount is the dial that starts the effect — Displace X and Displace Y sit inactive until you clear the checkbox. That is deliberate: the map and the spread get set up first, then you bring the push in.

The spectral split

13 params

This panel is what separates Chromatic from a plain displacement. Displace Spread sets how far apart the color channels fan as the image moves — the width of the spectrum. The default of 10 is a fine prismatic edge that reads as good glass; Displace Spread 30–60 is a deliberate rainbow break for shields, portals, and impact frames; at the top of the slider the channels stop reading as a spectrum and start reading as separate colored copies of the image. The dial is signed, and the sign mirrors the fan: the same width of split, running the other way through the same displacement.

Spread Chroma is the other half of that pair — the two together are the glassy-fringe look. At its default of 100 the fan is fully chromatic. Lower it and color drains out of the split while the spread itself survives, so Spread Chroma 20–40 buys you the softness and smear of a wide spread with only a hint of hue. That’s the setting for a plate that already carries strong color, where a full rainbow would read as a glitch rather than as glass.

Chroma Tint biases the color of the fan away from neutral and is signed in both directions from its default of 0. It’s a small dial that decides whether the fringe belongs in the shot: move it in steps of about 10 while watching a hard edge at a wide Displace Spread, and keep whichever direction seats the fringe in the plate’s palette. Leave Chroma Tint = 0 when you want the spread’s own spectrum untouched.

Spread Quality is the fidelity dial for the fan, stepping in whole numbers from 3 up to 50 on the slider, and it’s the last dial to set rather than the first. Build the width and the color, then look at the fringe at full resolution: if it reads coarse or stepped at that width, climb Spread Quality until it doesn’t and stop there. The default of 15 covers a lot of ground at moderate widths, and it’s the wide spreads — Displace Spread past 40 — that are worth re-checking after you’ve settled everything else.

Name Type Range Default Choices
License button — — —
Map layer — self —
Map Behavior popup — Center Center · Stretch To Fit · Tile
Map Alpha popup — Normal Normal · Premultiplied · Ignore Alpha
Soften Map slider 0–50 (hard 0–100) 5 —
Uniform Displacement checkbox — on —
Displace Amount slider -200–200 (hard -500–500) 0 —
Displace X slider -200–200 (hard -500–500) 0 —
Displace Y slider -200–200 (hard -500–500) 0 —
Displace Spread slider -100–100 (hard -300–300) 10 —
Spread Chroma slider 0–100 100 —
Chroma Tint slider -100–100 0 —
Spread Quality slider 3–50 (hard 3–100) 15 —

Master

2 params

The two macro dials ride a look you’ve already built, and they split it along its two natural seams. Master Amount multiplies the three displacement dials at once — Displace Amount, Displace X, Displace Y — and Master Scale multiplies Displace Spread and Soften Map, so the width of the spectrum and the smoothness of the field move together. 100 is neutral on both.

Knowing which dial folds what is the whole trick, because neither one covers the other’s territory. Master Amount is the intensity fader: keyframe it up from 0 and the entire distortion arrives without the balance between your axes shifting. Master Scale is the field dial: it widens the fan and blurs the height field together, so the distortion goes larger-featured and more spectral while the displacement dials stay exactly where you set them. Nothing folds all five, so any change that has to move both the push and the spread — rebuilding a look for a bigger frame, say — is a two-dial edit: set Master Amount and Master Scale separately and judge the result at full resolution rather than expecting one number to carry it. As everywhere in the suite, ride either a Master dial or the dials it folds — animating both multiplies twice.

Name Type Range Default Choices
Master Amount slider 0–200 (hard 0–400) 100% —
Master Scale slider 0–200 (hard 0–400) 100% —

Examples

Prismatic edges on a title

Type that fringes into spectrum along its own letterforms, arriving with the build

  1. Apply Chromatic to the title layer and leave Map on its default. The layer maps itself, so the letterforms are the height field and every fringe lands on an edge you drew.
  2. Ramp the cliffs: Soften Map = 14. Text is the hardest-edged map there is, and without the blur the edges tear instead of refracting.
  3. Small push, big split: leave Uniform Displacement on and set Displace Amount = 14. The letters should barely move — the spectrum is the effect here, not the warp.
  4. Open the fan: Displace Spread = 55 with Spread Chroma = 100. A split that wide is where fidelity starts to matter, so set Spread Quality = 36, then look at a letterform at full resolution and climb from there if the fringe still reads coarse.
  5. Animate the push with one dial: keyframe Master Amount up from 0 across the title’s build and the whole warp arrives with the words — it folds Displace Amount for you. The fan width and the map blur ride Master Scale instead, so leave that one at 100 unless you want the spectrum to open up as the title lands.

Variations: flip Displace Spread to -55 for the mirrored spectrum; or point Map at a soft radial ramp instead of the layer itself, so the title bows through a lens rather than fringing on its own contours.

Heat-warped glass over a plate

A shimmering refractive field between camera and subject, driven by an animated noise map

  1. Build the map: a comp-sized solid carrying an animated fractal-noise effect. Precompose it and switch its visibility off — the effect reads a map layer as it sits in the timeline, not the effect stack on top of it.
  2. Apply Chromatic to the plate and set Map to that precomp. Map Behavior stays on Center since the map is already comp-sized; if you built the noise as a small seamless tile instead, use Tile to keep its feature size. Set Map Alpha to Ignore Alpha so nothing in the map’s alpha can cut a hole in the field.
  3. Smooth the field: Soften Map = 18. Heat has no hard edges, and blurring the height field is what turns noise cells into rolling lenses.
  4. Weight the shear: turn Uniform Displacement off, then Displace X = 30 against Displace Y = 8. A field that wobbles mostly across frame reads as air moving past; an even push in both axes reads as glass sitting still.
  5. Keep the color honest: Displace Spread = 12 with Spread Quality = 15. At that width the split only puts a faint spectral edge on high-contrast boundaries, which is what makes the warp look like it’s happening in front of the lens instead of inside the image.
  6. The shimmer’s motion is the map’s motion — animate the noise precomp, not the effect. If the whole field needs to be coarser and wider without re-dialing anything, take Master Scale = 130.

Variations: raise Displace Spread toward 40 and Spread Quality toward 40 for an energy-shield read instead of heat; or put Chromatic on a masked adjustment layer to confine the field to a doorway, a vent, or the surface of a shield.

Prism burst on an impact frame

A shockwave lens that fans the frame into spectrum on the hit and clears in six frames

  1. Build the shape of the burst: a precomp holding a white radial ramp — bright center, black edge — centered on the impact point. Its slopes all point outward from the middle, which is the shape of a shockwave lens.
  2. Apply Chromatic to an adjustment layer above the shot, set Map to the ramp precomp, and set Map Behavior to Stretch To Fit so the ramp always covers frame whatever its native size.
  3. Soften Map = 20, so any banding in the ramp doesn’t become a stack of rings in the distortion.
  4. The hit: keyframe Displace Amount up from 0 to a peak of 90 on the impact frame and back down six frames later, holding the peak for exactly one frame. Sharp attack, fast decay — that shape is the whole illusion.
  5. Fan it hard: Displace Spread = 80, and raise Spread Quality = 45 to match — the widest spreads are where the default stops being enough, and a hit that lasts six frames still gets stepped through frame by frame.
  6. Seat the color: move Chroma Tint in steps of about 10 in both directions and keep the one whose fringe belongs to the shot — Chroma Tint = -30 and Chroma Tint = 30 give very different frames over the same plate.

Variations: set Displace Spread to -80 for the mirrored fan; or leave the displacement dials static and put the same keyframes on Master Amount instead, so every duplicated hit rides one slider.