What it does
Looks through ribbed glass: rounded vertical flutes that bend and repeat the image like a textured shower door.
Reeded glass had a design moment in the physical world before it had one on screen. Interior architecture adopted it everywhere, partitions, cabinet fronts, lobby walls, because it solves a real problem elegantly: it passes light while dissolving detail, privacy without darkness. The vocabulary travels with it, reeded for the narrow convex ribs, fluted for concave channels, ribbed as the catch-all, and graphic design borrowed the whole look, putting titles and portraits behind virtual glass for exactly the same reveal-and-conceal energy.
What the flutes do to an image is refraction, and getting it right is what separates glass from a wavy smear. Each reed is a small lens: light crosses the curved front surface and bends, travels through the body of the glass, then bends again leaving the flat back, and how far the view shifts depends on the glass thickness and its refractive index. Simulating that path for every pixel makes the image compress, repeat, and flip inside each rib the way a real pane behaves, and splitting the trace by wavelength adds the fine color fringing thick glass shows at its edges. A frost control roughens the surface microscopically, scattering the view into the soft translucency of a bathroom window.
Vertical ribs are only the default. The same optics run through wedge-cut prisms, egg-crate grids, interlocking diamond tiles, and crossed flutes, each tessellation bending the image into its own rhythm, and the whole grid rotates. Dialing in irregularity perturbs the reeds like hand-rolled artisan glass, so the bands wander slightly instead of repeating with machine precision. On video the pane holds still while the scene swims behind it, which is precisely how it feels to watch someone walk past a fluted window.
Signature looks
Shower door
Classic vertical flutes with a breath of frost. Shapes and colors survive, identities dissolve, the domestic privacy pane.
Prism wall
Sharp wedge-cut ribs with visible color fringing at the facet edges. Harder, colder, closer to cut crystal than bathroom glass.
Artisan pane
Irregular, gently wandering reeds like hand-rolled glass. The bands drift and vary so the texture reads as crafted, not printed.
Try it on your own footage
This effect runs live in the Modulate editor, with layers, effect chains, masks, and keyframes. Free, no signup, nothing to install.
Common questions
What is reeded glass?
Architectural glass textured with narrow parallel ribs, made by rolling molten glass through patterned rollers. The ribs act as vertical lenses, so the view through the pane breaks into repeating distorted slices that pass light but obscure detail. It is widely used for partitions, doors, and cabinet fronts, and the same look has become a popular treatment in graphic design.
What is the difference between reeded, fluted, and ribbed glass?
They describe close siblings of the same texture. Reeded glass has narrow convex ribs standing out from the surface, fluted glass has concave channels carved into it, and ribbed is the umbrella term covering both. Visually they distort in the same family of vertical bands; the profile of the groove decides whether highlights bow outward or pinch inward.
Is the reeded glass effect just a wavy displacement?
A convincing one is not. Sliding pixels sideways with a sine wave produces wobble, but real ribbed glass compresses, repeats, and flips the image inside each rib because light refracts at both surfaces of the pane. An effect that traces that path, with the glass thickness and refractive index as physical controls, reproduces the doubled highlights and band-edge fringing a smear cannot fake.
Why do designers put text behind reeded glass?
Because the texture sits exactly on the line between showing and hiding. Type behind flutes stays recognizable in silhouette while its edges shatter into rhythm, which gives a layout depth and restraint at once. Moving the text, or the glass, animates the reveal, and that pass-behind-the-pane moment has become a signature of contemporary title design.
Can you apply the reeded glass effect to video?
Yes, and it is at its best there: the pane stays fixed while footage moves behind it, so the ribs continuously slice and re-slice the scene, exactly like watching movement through a fluted window. In Modulate the reeded glass effect runs live on images and video in the browser.
Related effects
Edge warp effect
Pulls the image toward the center and squeezes a stretched, magnified band around the edges, like looking through thick curved glass.
Spherize effect
Wraps the image onto a sphere — the disk bends over the ball, on a flat colour or transparent background.
Wave effect
Bends the image with moving distortion: swirling turbulence, rolling directional waves, or rings spreading from a point.
Chromatic aberration
Splits the red, green, and blue channels slightly apart so edges fringe with color, like a photo taken through a misaligned lens.