The Artfkt collection library
Broken Glass
Fracture the image through glass
Broken Glass turns an image into a scene seen through fractured material—or reflected in a damaged mirror. Branching cracks, small granules, attached layers, tapered splinters, and suspended fragments each produce a different interruption.
Use fracture structure to establish the composition before emphasizing refraction, thickness, reflections, or local illumination. Dense glass and large images can be demanding to render on either backend.
Included in Artfkt for Mac. All collections, one desktop studio.
Choose how the glass breaks
Impact Glass concentrates damage around a strike point while retaining much of the pane. Tempered Glass breaks the surface into smaller irregular granules. Laminated Glass keeps two fracture networks over a retaining interlayer. These choices change where the eye finds continuity and where it encounters a break.
A strong subject behind the pane makes these differences visible. Place a concentrated impact away from essential facial or typographic detail if that detail must remain clear. A fracture should establish a point of tension, not accidentally hide the only meaningful part of the source.
Distinguish a broken mirror from transparent shards
Broken Mirror uses the incoming image as the reflected scene. Its tilted pieces change the reflection, while chipped backing exposes glass edges. The other glass treatments use the picture as a backdrop viewed through material. Open spaces reveal an unobstructed view, which creates a useful comparison with the distorted areas.
Glass Splinters emphasizes narrow directional prisms; Suspended Shards gives irregular fragments visible thickness and overlap in depth. Use those structures when you want pieces to become objects in the composition. Balance optical strength against the amount of source information that needs to remain recognizable.
Let highlights explain the edges
A glass edge can read through a small highlight or a refracted color boundary without requiring strong distortion across its whole face. Start with clear light-dark structure in the source, then turn the effect’s lighting to distinguish neighboring pieces.
Judge both the fragment silhouette and the full picture. Overlapping glass, dense fracture detail, and larger output sizes can take seconds per frame; allow the preview to settle before deciding that fine optical detail is missing. This is a composition treatment, not an instruction to damage a physical object.
Effects in Broken Glass
6 effects to explore and combine.
Impact Glass
A mostly intact pane with branching air fissures, chipped impact damage, reflective internal faces, and local refracted illumination.
Tempered Glass
Irregular glass granules with small face tilts, narrow separations, spectral edge refraction, and local glints over an unobstructed backdrop.
Laminated Glass
Two fractured glass layers held over a continuous interlayer, with layer parallax, concentrated stress haze, and transmitted source detail.
Broken Mirror
Angular glass pieces over chipped reflective backing. Each orientation changes the reflected source scene while exposed glass edges refract light.
Glass Splinters
Tapered glass prisms with varied lengths, chipped tips, a dominant direction, and spectral refraction through real entry and exit faces.
Suspended Shards
Irregular solid glass fragments suspended in depth, with visible thickness, overlapping transmission, studio reflections, and local caustics.
Creative applications
- Place an impact point within an otherwise readable poster image to create a concentrated visual interruption.
- Reinterpret a portrait or object as angular mirrored fragments for cover art.
- Use separated splinters as a directional optical accent around a clean title layer.
Starting workflow
- For a fractured cover image, choose a source with a clear subject and a quieter area beside it.
- Apply Impact Glass and place its strike point in that quieter area so branching damage directs attention toward the subject.
- Adjust the fracture structure before balancing thickness and refraction. Compare unobstructed regions with areas behind the pane.
- Turn the lighting to make edges visible without filling the image with competing highlights.
- Let the preview finish refining, then inspect at output size. Reduce fracture density or optical strength if the subject no longer reads.
Make it part of your next composition.
Combine Broken Glass with other collections, images, and editable text in Artfkt for Mac.