Fluted glass effect
To make a fluted glass effect for free, open your photo in Mote, the free Windows app, send it to Prisma and add the “Fluted glass” effect. Mote is a free Windows app whose Prisma mode computes, in real time on the graphics card, the image seen through a material: fluted glass, frosted glass, rain on the window, glass bricks.
Five settings are enough: groove width, angle, refraction, blur and highlights. You see everything while you move the sliders, and the image exports at up to four times its display size.
In Mote : Prisma
Examples
No fluted glass example on the site yet: here are other effects from Prisma, the same mode.
Prisma · ASCII render · two-strip Technicolor, CMYK, iridescence
Prisma · Emboss
Prisma · Japanese ink wash
Prisma · Gold on indigo
A bathroom window, turned design trend.
Fluted or reeded glass is glass moulded in rounded vertical bands. Each groove acts as a small lens: the image behind breaks into columns, squeezed, shifted or flipped. You find it in shower doors and furniture from the 1930s to the 1970s, and it came back strongly in interior design, then in web design, as a blurred background behind a headline.
In Prisma, refraction goes from 0 (no effect) to 1.5: around 0.5 each groove shows one column of the image; at 1 it mirrors it. The angle runs from −90 to 90°, for vertical, horizontal or slanted grooves. Blur and highlights give the glass its thickness. The effect combines with the other 137, for example film grain or a colour gradient on top.
How to do it in Mote, in three steps.
- 01Open your photo and send it to Prisma. A photo, a gradient or a render from another mode: anything can go behind the glass.
- 02Add “Fluted glass”. From the effects browser or Ctrl+K then “fluted”. Set the width (as a % of the image height), the angle and the refraction.
- 03Export. PNG, WebP or JPEG, from 1× to 4×. Fluted glass is a still effect; for a video, add an animated effect (grain, light) and export MP4 or WebM.
- Width
- 0.5 → 20 % of the height
- Angle
- −90 → 90°
- Refraction
- 0 → 1.5 (1 = mirror)
- Blur
- 0 → 10
- Highlights
- 0 → 1
Not in Mote Web.
Fluted glass lives in Prisma, which is not in Mote Web: you need the app, which is free.
Download for Windows ↓Questions
- What is the fluted glass effect?
- The look of an image seen through grooved glass: the image breaks into vertical bands, distorted by each groove.
- How do I make it without Photoshop?
- In Mote: Prisma, “Fluted glass” effect. No displacement map to draw, five sliders do it all.
- For a website background?
- Export as WebP at 2× for high-density screens. Slightly stronger blur and light highlights keep text readable on top.
- Combine it with a gradient?
- Yes: start from a gradient image, or a blank canvas with a gradient-filled shape, then send it to Prisma. That’s the “glass and colour” background seen on many sites.
- In high resolution for print?
- Export goes up to 4× the working size, recomputed on the graphics card (not an upscale). For a poster, start from a large photo.
Related effects
- 07VHS and glitch effects, free and watermark-free
Tape, CRT screen, corrupted file, in real time. - 06Free duotone effect
Two inks, and the whole picture. - 04Free risograph effect, with real separations
Riso inks, misregistration, and real layers for the print shop. - 01Free halftone effect: turn a photo into dots
A photo turned into dots, like a newspaper or a comic. - M06See the mode Prisma
Real-time effects stacked like layers. Glass, VHS, bleeding ink, paper.