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Cool effect

Thermal Vision

Thermal Vision is a colour grade in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. False-color heat mapping from cold blue to white-hot.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Thermal Vision free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle illustration mapped to heat colours, blue lines with yellow and magenta hot bands — Thermal Vision, default settings

What Thermal Vision does

Reads brightness as temperature: dark tones go cold blue, then sky blue, magenta, yellow and white-hot at the top. Palette swaps the scale for Iron (black through purple and crimson to orange), Spectrum or a single-hue Mono, and Tint rotates whichever you pick. Bias shifts the whole image colder or hotter, and Noise rules a faint diagonal ripple over it like sensor grain.

Using Thermal Vision

Where it works: Surveillance-style Reels, dark techno visuals and logo stings that want found-footage heat camera. It's the only Cool grade with swappable scales, so one effect covers a cold-blue read and a hot ironbow.
With the music: Nothing here reacts to sound by default. B1 kick on Bias heats the frame toward yellow and white on every kick, and a slow free LFO on Tint walks the whole scale round the colour wheel.
Starting point: Palette on Thermal, Bias at centre, Noise a quarter, Blend three-quarters, then push Bias right until the subject reaches yellow.

Controls

Noise: Spatial heat pattern ripple.
Blend: False-color vs original mix.
Bias: Where the image sits on the ramp. Centre is the authored reading, either side pushes it cold or hot.
Palette: Which false-colour scale the temperature is read against.
Tint: Rotates the scale around the wheel, and picks the single hue outright on Mono.
Direction: Which way the heat ripple is ruled.

Pairs well with Thermal Vision