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December 4, 2022
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Suggestion updates to the glow effect

  • December 4, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 371 views

The native Adobe Glow effect is pretty old and hasn't seen any significant updates in a long time (ever?).

Although there are several 3rd party glow effects that offer a broader range of features, there's still the potantial for Adobe to update the existing effect to improve it's functionality but without going as far as a whole new plugin.

Here are 4 suggested improvements that could be made to the existing effect:
1) Alternative falloff types, especially inverse square and also an adjustable exponential control
2)  More precise control over the threshold that allows for HDR values and perhaps a softness.  Maybe a value rather than percentage (thus not clamped to 0 -100). Working in 32bit sometimes we only want to add glow to bright areas that are already well over 1.0 but not affect the actual 0 - 1 areas of the image.
3) More options for what the glow is based on, instead of just color or alpha, include individual RGB channels, lightness / luminance / saturation as in other existing channel plugins.
4) Some type of control over the saturation of hot / clipped colors so that as colors get really bright they head towards white.  To use Chris Brejon's terminology, we want to avoid the "notorious six".  In fact the tendency of the AE glow plugin to push colors towards the "notorious six" is one of the biggest issues I have with it.  In practical terms, this is something more application to working in 8 / 16 bit and not 32 bit, so I guess it would involve making the plugin aware of bit depth and gamma.

 

These suggestions would improve the current glow effect without directly competing with 3rd party effects that offer more stylised outputs.

 

(and here's a link to Chris Brejon's website where he demonstrates the "notorious 6")
https://chrisbrejon.com/articles/ocio-display-transforms-and-misconceptions/

1 reply

Known Participant
December 6, 2022

Totally agree, I never use the native After Effects Glow -  only sapphire S-Glow and co.!