What it does
Bends the image with moving distortion: swirling turbulence, rolling directional waves, or rings spreading from a point.
The classic water ripple is the ring: circular wavefronts radiating from a point, displacing the image under each crest and dying away with distance like a stone dropped in a pond. Its directional cousin rolls the whole frame along one axis, as if the picture were printed on fabric or seen through shallow moving water, and a second swell crossing the first stops it reading as a flat stripe pattern. The wavefronts themselves can be smooth, sharp-creased, or stepped, which changes the material the surface suggests.
Turbulence is the deeper trick, because real flowing water is neither rings nor stripes, it is eddies. The honest way to fake it is a flow field with no sources or sinks, only rotation, so the image churns and swirls locally without ever sliding off in some direction. Built that way, the motion can drift forever without repeating, like a current, or close its path exactly so the animation loops seamlessly, which matters the moment the output is a looping post rather than a live preview.
The craft details are what keep the illusion intact. Displaced pixels have to come from somewhere at the frame edge, so the effect can reflect the image back into itself, stretch the border, or wrap around to the far side, and which one is right depends on the composition. Rings should stay round on widescreen frames rather than smearing into ovals. And a prismatic fringe can be added that scales with the local distortion, so heavily displaced areas break subtly into spectral color while calm areas stay clean, the same dispersion real refraction produces.
Signature looks
Pond rings
Concentric ripples radiating from a single point and fading with distance. The stone-in-water classic, readable on anything.
Silk flag
The whole frame rolling on slow directional waves, an image printed on fabric moving in wind.
Liquid drift
Never-repeating turbulence churning the image like a slow current seen from above. Organic, continuous, hypnotic.
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
How do you make a water ripple effect?
Every water ripple works the same way underneath: each pixel is pushed a small distance along an animated displacement field, and the field is what makes it water. Rings from a point give the classic pond ripple, a rolling directional wave reads as fabric or current, and turbulent noise reads as the surface itself moving. In Modulate you add the Wave effect to any image or video layer and the distortion animates live in the browser.
What is the difference between a ripple and turbulence?
A ripple is geometric and periodic: wavefronts with a regular spacing traveling outward or across the frame, clearly a disturbance moving over a surface. Turbulence is a field of irregular swirling eddies with no repeating structure, so it reads as the liquid itself flowing rather than something crossing it. Ripples announce an event, a splash or a touch; turbulence sets a continuous mood.
Can a ripple effect loop seamlessly?
Yes, and it is worth insisting on. Traveling waves are periodic by nature, so they loop when a whole number of cycles fits the clip. Turbulence is trickier because natural drift never repeats, but the field can be evolved along a closed path so it returns exactly to its starting state at the end of the composition. Modulate aligns the animation to the composition length so exported loops cycle without a visible seam.
How is a wave effect different from a displacement map?
They share the mechanism, pixels pushed by a field, but differ in where the field comes from. A wave effect generates it mathematically, as rings, directional waves, or turbulent noise, so it animates on its own and needs nothing else. A displacement map reads the field from another image or video. Generated fields give you physics-flavored motion for free; mapped fields give you art direction.
Can you add a water ripple to video?
Yes. The distortion field animates on its own clock, independent of the footage, so the two motions layer: the video plays and the water moves over it. Subtle turbulence is an easy way to make static B-roll feel alive, and ring ripples can punctuate a beat or a tap. It runs in real time in the browser, on both images and video.
Related effects
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.
Spherize effect
Wraps the image onto a sphere — the disk bends over the ball, on a flat colour or transparent background.
Chromatic aberration
Splits the red, green, and blue channels slightly apart so edges fringe with color, like a photo taken through a misaligned lens.
Edge warp effect
Pulls the image toward the center and squeezes a stretched, magnified band around the edges, like looking through thick curved glass.