What it does
Wraps the image onto a sphere — the disk bends over the ball, on a flat colour or transparent background.
Spherize is a map projection run in reverse. Cartographers flatten a globe onto paper and accept the distortion; spherize takes flat artwork and pays the same cost in the other direction, assigning each ring of the image to a latitude on the ball. Near the pole facing you the surface is square-on and the picture is barely touched. Toward the rim the surface turns edge-on, so more and more image is packed into thinner and thinner slivers of screen. That accelerating compression at the edge, with straight lines bowing into arcs, is the entire visual signature of a sphere.
It is often confused with a fisheye lens, but the two curve different things. A fisheye is a camera looking out at the world, bending a wide scene into the frame with the strongest magnification at the center. Spherize treats the picture itself as a surface and bends it over a form. The framing choice matters too: kept inside the frame, the ball reads as an object sitting on a background, solid or transparent; grown past the corners, only the bulge remains and the whole frame appears to swell toward the viewer.
In practice it is a designer’s effect as much as a distortion. Wrapping type over the ball turns flat lettering into something printed on a marble or a globe, arcing and squeezing exactly as it should. A texture becomes a planet; a photo becomes a paperweight holding its own scene. The sphere’s edge stays pixel-crisp rather than fading out, which keeps the object readable at any size, and on video the ball holds still while the footage swims across its surface.
Signature looks
Glass marble
The whole image caught inside a ball on a clean background, an object you could pick up off the page.
Full-frame bulge
The sphere grown past the corners so the entire frame bows toward the viewer. The peephole view, all curve and no rim.
Type on a ball
Flat lettering wrapped over the curve until it reads as printed on the surface, arcing and compressing toward the edge.
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 does the spherize effect do?
It remaps an image so it appears wrapped around a sphere viewed straight on. Pixels near the center keep roughly their true position and scale, and pixels farther out slide toward the ball’s silhouette, compressing as the surface turns away from the viewer. Everything outside the ball shows a background instead, a flat color or nothing at all, so the sphere reads as an object in the frame.
What is the difference between spherize and fisheye?
They bulge in opposite senses. A fisheye is a lens projection: the camera looks out at a scene and crams a huge field of view into the frame, magnifying the center. Spherize is a surface mapping: your flat image is treated as the skin of a ball, and the edges wrap away from you. Fisheye curves the world; spherize curves the picture.
Why does the image squeeze at the edge of the ball?
At the silhouette of a sphere, the surface is turning fully edge-on to the viewer, so a wide band of the wrapped image occupies almost no screen space. The compression grows without limit right at the rim, which is exactly what happens when you photograph a real printed ball. That runaway squeeze is what makes the eye accept the shape as three-dimensional.
Can you spherize only part of an image?
Yes. The ball has a position and a size, so it can sit over one region of the composition while everything outside it shows the background, or be pushed past the frame edges until only the central bulge is visible. In an editor with layers you can also spherize a single layer and leave the rest of the composition flat, which is how orb and badge graphics are usually built.
Can you spherize a video?
Yes, and it is a striking move precisely because the geometry is stable: the sphere stays fixed in the frame while the footage plays across its curved surface, like a scene trapped in a marble. In Modulate the Spherize effect runs live on images and video in the browser, with the ball placed and sized directly in the editor.
Related effects
Wave effect
Bends the image with moving distortion: swirling turbulence, rolling directional waves, or rings spreading from a point.
Displacement map
Pushes the image around using another layer as a map: bright and dark areas offset the pixels for heat-haze, glass, and melt looks.
Edge warp effect
Pulls the image toward the center and squeezes a stretched, magnified band around the edges, like looking through thick curved glass.