Canvas Mode

Stop exporting to lay it out.

Cineon graded your photos. Then you took them somewhere else to become a post. Canvas Mode is that second app, built into the first — and because the layout is finished here, the film can finally run across all of it.

1080 × 1350

Drop on an edgeThe frame splitsFilm runs across it

The round trip

What the export button used to cost you

It looks like one click. It is not. You export, you switch apps, you rebuild a grid you already had in your head, and then you find the crop was wrong and go back for a new export. Do that on a ten-slide carousel and the afternoon is gone.

The worse cost is invisible. Grain applied to each photo separately is grain that stops at every border — a hard seam where two grain fields meet, in a medium that has no seams. Nobody points at it. Everybody sees it.

What changes

The artboard is the negative

In Canvas Mode a frame is a real output size, and everything you put in it — photos, type, shapes, your logo — is flattened into one image before a single effect runs. Then the chain runs on that. One grain structure over the whole composition. One halation, blooming across a border if the highlight happens to sit on one. One grade.

That is not a shortcut for applying the same settings four times. It is a different result, and it is the one film actually produces.

The seam

Four grain fields, four borders

Grain is a structure, not a texture — a field of silver crystals with a size and a distribution. Two fields generated independently do not line up, and the eye is very good at the place where they meet. It is the same reason a panorama stitched from two exposures announces itself even when the colour matches.

Flattening first removes the question. There is one image, so there is one field over it, and the border between two photos is just an edge in the picture rather than an edge in the film.

Why it looks different

Grain that stops at a border is a border.

Four photos graded apart give you four grain fields meeting at hard lines. Nobody points at it — everybody sees it. Grade the artboard instead and the field is continuous, because there is only one of it.

↔

Graded separatelyFour grain fields. Four seams.

Graded as one artboardOne field, crossing every border.

Drag to compare

Layout

Every drop is a split

Drag a photo onto the edge of a region and that region divides in two: one half keeps what was there, the other becomes the new picture's cell. Drop again on any seam to keep going.

A grid of rows and columns cannot express that. Add a column to a two-row grid and you get two new cells for one photo, one of them empty and staring at you. Splitting the frame itself gives you exactly the cell you asked for. Drag the divider to change the balance; the photos hold their places, because each cell keeps a stable identity rather than a position in a list.

Type & vectors

Not a sticker layer

Text and shapes are live geometry with fill and stroke, resizable without going soft. Import an SVG and it is merged by appearance on the way in — a monochrome logo becomes one object you can select, a three-colour mark becomes three layers worth reaching for, instead of the forty nested groups the design tool left in the file.

Any vector can mask any photo. Draw an ellipse over a portrait and it crops to it. The mask is geometry, so you can keep moving both.

Shape over photo

While you work

Grade off, grade on

Rendering film across a full artboard is real work, and you do not want it happening while you nudge a photo three pixels. One switch pauses the effects so layout runs at full speed, and turns them back on when you want to see what you are actually making.

Output

The artboard is the export

Frames carry pixel dimensions, not aspect ratios. Pick Story and you are working at 1080×1920 — the size the file will be. Nothing is scaled on the way out, so what you nudged into place is what ships.

Export asks you nothing about resolution. There is nothing left to ask.

Make the whole post in one place

Every effect is free to use. You pay only when you export.