The History
of Visual
Effects
321 effects, techniques, and looks from the history of photography, film, graphic design, and digital visual culture. Arranged chronologically by decade. The date marks introduction, breakthrough, popularization, or a specifically cited example, depending on the case; it is not a universal invention date.
- 321
- 183
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How to read this atlas
Learning names
German and English names help with recognition and searching.
Examine images
Look for traces in edges, light, color, space and time.
Understanding the principle
Connect each look with its optical, chemical, or digital cause.
Try it out
Test the small exercise for each effect. Then use the six learning sessions.
Classification
The decade denotes introduction, breakthrough, or widespread use. It is not always the invention date.
Deepen your understanding
Open sources via the image caption. Notes provide context, image credits, and answers.
Historical atlas
1930s
- Rear Projection
- Three-Strip Technicolor
- Travelling Matte
- Light Painting
- Day for Night
- Optical Printer
- Interlacing
- Kodachrome Color
- Multiplane Camera
- Pinscreen Animation
- Stroboscopic Photography
- Direct Animation on Film
- Political Retouching
- Kirlian Photography
- Fumage
- Decalcomania
- Distortion Photography
- Zone System
- Photoelasticity
- Busby Berkeley Top Shot
1960s
- Slit-Scan Photography
- Magnetic CRT Distortion
- Liquid Light Show
- Film Grain
- False-Color Infrared
- Fisheye Lens
- Front Projection
- Sodium Vapor Process
- Rack Focus
- ASCII Art
- Lenticular Print
- Ben-Day Dots
- Op Art
- Holography
- Silkscreen Print
- Jump Cut
- Crash Zoom
- Star Filter
- Mordançage
- Push Processing
- Match Cut
- Xerographic Animation
- Spirograph
- Cymatics
- Scanning Electron Micrograph
- Pen Plotter Art
- Flicker Film
- Psychedelic Poster Art
- Sand Animation
- Paik–Abe Video Synthesizer
1970s
- Video Feedback
- Wireframe CGI
- Chroma Key
- Motion-Control Photography
- Split-Field Diopter
- Rutt–Etra Scan Processing
- Scanimate Analog Animation
- Texture Mapping
- Bump Mapping
- Photocopy Aesthetic
- Phong Shading
- Gouraud Shading
- Polaroid SX-70
- Polaroid Manipulation
- Steadicam Float
- Vector Display Graphics
- Teletext Graphics
- Graduated Filter
- Conway's Game of Life
- Animatronics
- Dot-Matrix Printout
1980s
- Backlit Animation
- 1-Bit Dithering
- Image Morphing
- Time-Lapse
- VHS Tape Artifacts
- CRT Scanlines
- Recursive Ray Tracing
- Radiosity
- Risograph
- Particle Systems
- Fractal Landscape
- Mandelbrot Set
- Perlin Noise
- Raster Bars
- Go Motion
- Pixel Art
- Orton Effect
- Lith Printing
- Digital Video Effects
- Quantel Paintbox
- Palette Cycling
- Sprite Scaling
- Film Colorization
- Photographic Joiners
- Paint-on-Glass Animation
- Animated GIF
1990s
- Photorealistic CGI
- Bullet Time
- Cross Processing
- Bleach Bypass
- Light Leaks
- Lomography
- SnorriCam
- Wire Removal
- Pixelation
- Posterization
- Threshold
- Displacement Mapping
- Normal Mapping
- Night Vision
- Plasma Effect
- Mode 7
- Voxel Graphics
- Selective Color
- Isometric Pixel Graphics
- Raycasting
- Affine Texture Warping
- Distance Fog
- Fractal Flames
- Reaction-Diffusion Patterns
- L-System Plants
- Autostereogram
- ChromaDepth 3D
- Matrix Digital Rain
- WordArt
- Grunge Typography
- Shaky Cam
2000s
- HDR Imaging
- Miniature Faking
- Datamoshing
- Anamorphic Lens Flare
- Speed Ramping
- Motion Capture
- Databending
- Liquify
- Subsurface Scattering
- Ambient Occlusion
- Teal and Orange
- Emboss
- Bevel and Chrome
- Mirror Repeat
- Polar Coordinates
- Point Cloud Rendering
- Digital Color Grading
- Cel Shading
- Volumetric Light
- Crowd Simulation
- Fluid Simulation
- Fur Simulation
- Image-Based Lighting
- Redscale Film
- Panning Shot
- Long Exposure Water
- Focus Stacking
- Frutiger Aero
- Skeuomorphic Interface
2010s
- RGB Split
- Cinemagraph
- DeepDream
- AR Face Filters
- Split Toning
- Halation
- Bokeh
- Light Trails
- Zoom Blur
- Pixel Sorting
- JPEG Glitch
- Time Displacement
- Optical Flow Interpolation
- Duotone
- Gradient Map
- Moiré Pattern
- Depth-Map Portrait
- Photogrammetry
- Deepfake
- Hyperlapse
- Vaporwave Aesthetic
- Low Poly
- 360° Panorama
- Neural Style Transfer
- GAN Portraits
- Digital De-Aging
- Instagram Filters
- Beauty Filter
- Computational Night Mode
- Light Field Refocus
- Deep-Fried Meme
- Freelensing
- Flat Design
The machine image atlas
Edge & Features
- Canny Edge Detection
- Sobel X
- Sobel Y
- Sobel Magnitude
- Scharr Filter
- Prewitt Edges
- Roberts Cross
- Laplacian Edges
- Laplacian of Gaussian
- Difference of Gaussians
- Hough Line Transform
- Harris Corner Detection
- Shi–Tomasi Corners
- ORB Keypoints
- SIFT Scale Space
- Contour Extraction
- Adaptive Thresholding
- Otsu Binarization
- Local Binary Pattern
- CLAHE Local Contrast
- Histogram Equalization
- Kirsch Compass Edges
- Hough Circle Transform
- FAST Corners
- HOG Gradients
- Gabor Filter Bank
- Frangi Ridge Filter
- Structure Tensor Orientation
- MSER Regions
- Blob Detection
- Template Matching Heatmap
- Gaussian Pyramid
Masks & Control
- SLIC Superpixels
- Graph Segmentation
- Watershed Regions
- GrabCut Mask
- Binary Object Mask
- Alpha Matte
- Trimap
- Segmentation Boundaries
- Semantic Segmentation Map
- Instance Segmentation
- Bounding Box Detection
- OpenPose Skeleton
- Scribble Control
- Line Art Control
- Soft Edges
- M-LSD Structural Lines
- Monocular Depth Map
- Normal Map
- Distance Transform
- Wireframe Overlay
- Point Cloud Proxy
- Mean Shift Segmentation
- Connected Components
- Skeletonization
- Flood Fill
- Saliency Map
- Active Contour Snake
- Chan–Vese Level Set
- Quickshift Superpixels
- Convex Hull Mask
- Random Walker Segmentation
Color & Quantization
- Luminance Grayscale
- Color Negative
- Sepia Matrix
- Duotone Mapping
- Cyanotype Simulation
- K-Means Color Quantization
- Indexed Color Palette
- Hue Rotation
- Saturation Boost
- Gamma Curve
- Solarization Filter
- RGB Channel Isolation
- White Balance Shift
- Channel Mixer
- Color Inversion
- Color-Blindness Simulation
- Levels Stretch
- Reinhard Color Transfer
- HSV Channel Split
- Lab Opponent Channels
- Decorrelation Stretch
Print & Dither
- Halftone Dot Screen
- Bayer Ordered Dither
- Floyd–Steinberg Dither
- 1-Bit Threshold
- ASCII Art Render
- ANSI 16-Color Terminal
- Nearest-Neighbor Pixelation
- Voronoi Mosaic
- Embossed Relief
- Pencil Sketch
- Charcoal Contours
- Stipple Pointillism
- Risograph Registration Error
- Atkinson Dither
- Blue-Noise Dither
- Crosshatching
- Mezzotint
- Delaunay Triangle Mosaic
- Spiral Halftone
- Truchet Tiles
- Cross-Stitch Pattern
- Watercolor Wash
- Hexagonal Pixels
- Brick Mosaic
- Woodcut Print
- Circle Packing Mosaic
Video & Glitch
- VHS Tracking Noise
- RGB Channel Split
- Chromatic Aberration
- JPEG Compression Artifacts
- Block Glitch
- NTSC Composite Bleed
- Color Channel Noise
- Scanline Displacement
- Palette Glitch
- Rolling Shutter Wobble
- Screen Tearing
- Chroma Subsampling
- Bit-Plane Slicing
- TV Static Snow
- Bayer CFA Mosaic
- Hot Pixel Noise
- LCD Subpixel View
- Aliasing Jaggies
Space & Optics
- Wave Displacement
- Swirl
- Fisheye Distortion
- Barrel Lens Warp
- Kaleidoscope Mirror
- Mirror Tiling
- Linear Motion Blur
- Radial Zoom Blur
- Tilt-Shift Miniature
- Displacement Map
- Liquify Brush
- Bloom
- Perspective Warp
- Droste Recursion
- Frosted Glass
- Pincushion Distortion
- Thin-Plate Spline Warp
- Möbius Transformation
- Crystal Ball Refraction
Filters & Motion
- Gaussian Blur
- Median Filter
- Bilateral Filter
- Unsharp Mask
- Non-Local Means Denoising
- Morphological Opening
- Morphological Closing
- Optical Flow Vectors
- Frame Differencing
- Temporal Echo
- Fourier Magnitude Spectrum
- Fourier Low-Pass Filter
- Fourier High-Pass Filter
- Classical Image Inpainting
- Box Blur
- Kuwahara Filter
- Anisotropic Diffusion
- Seam Carving
- Wiener Deblurring
- Dark Channel Dehaze
- Multi-Scale Retinex
- Total Variation Denoising
- Rolling-Ball Background
- Morphological Gradient