Guide
Blending Modes in Toji Motion: Glow, Lighten and Composite Tricks
Blending modes decide how a layer mixes with everything beneath it. This guide covers the modes editors actually use for glow, light and texture work.
By Felix Marlowe, Motion Graphics App Reviewer
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What Blending Actually Decides
A layer normally hides what sits beneath it. A blending mode changes that bargain: instead of covering, the layer's colours combine with the stack below by a rule, lighten, darken, multiply, screen and their relatives. In the Toji Motion effects editor, blending is how light effects stop looking pasted on and start looking photographed.
The practical test is simple. If an effect layer looks like a sticker, it wants a blend mode. If it looks like light in the scene, it already has the right one.
Light Work: Screen and Add Styles
Glow, lens effects, particles and light leaks live on the lighten side of the family. Their dark parts should vanish into the scene while their bright parts add light, which is what screen-style modes do. Stack a glow layer this way and keyframe its opacity, and a title can bloom on a beat using the timing method from the text animation guide.
Duplicate before you blend destructively. The clean layer underneath is your retreat when a composite goes muddy.
Dark Work: Multiply and Texture
Multiply-style modes do the mirror job: white vanishes, dark parts deepen. Grain, vignettes, paper texture and shadow passes belong here. A whisper of grain blended over a too-clean render is the oldest trick in motion work, and it survives because it fixes the artificial smoothness that makes phone edits look synthetic.
Textures also hide compression. A graded, grained export holds together better through a feed's recompression, a pairing explored in the export settings guide.
Taste: The Mode Is Not the Look
Blending multiplies whatever taste you bring to it, in both directions. Change one variable at a time, mode, then opacity, then the layer's own colour, and preview at full speed. Save winning combinations as presets so a discovered look becomes a tool, following the shelf habits in the presets guide. The app itself waits on the download page.
Quick Answers
Which blending mode makes glow look real?
A lighten-side mode such as screen, so the dark parts of the glow layer vanish and only the light adds to the scene.
Why does my effect look pasted on?
It is probably unblended at full opacity. Give it a blend mode suited to its content and lower opacity until it sits in the scene.
Can blending fix a flat-looking export?
Partly. A subtle grain or texture layer blended over the render reduces the synthetic smoothness that feeds make worse.