Deep Glow Manual
Deep Glow Manual
Deep Glow Manual
3 Manual
Deep Glow v1.3 Manual
Installation directories:
Windows:
Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects <version>\Support Files\Plug-ins
Mac:
Applications/Adobe After Effects <version>/Plug-ins
If you have any technical difficulties or licensing issues please submit a ticket on
aescripts.com
Radius:
Range of the glow from 0 - 2,000. Note that if Auto Iterations is disabled, large radius
values (1,000+) require higher iterations to ensure good results.
Exposure:
Multiplies the luminance of the glow’s source. This happens after pixels are thresholded out,
so increasing exposure will not increase the amount of pixels chosen for the glow.
Input: Threshold
Threshold for pixel luminance to contribute to the glow. 100% is a pixel that’s 1.0 in 32bpc
(255 at 8bpc & 32,768 at 16bpc). This can go beyond 100% to source only HDR pixels.
Input: Threshold Smooth
Determines the falloff for pixel contribution. 0% means pixels are either ‘on or off’ where
100% adds a smooth ramp between pixels that contribute to the glow and those that don’t.
Higher values reduce glow ‘flicker’.
Style: Blend Mode
Screen: Clamps values at 1.0
Add: Doesn’t clamp values at 1.0 (if working at 32bpc)
Screen is recommended unless you require HDR values and/or are working in a linear
colorspace.
Style: Aspect Ratio
A value of 1.0 weights both axes equally. A value of 2 is horizontal only and 0 is vertical only.
Style: Gamma correction
Recommended to keep auto gamma correction on which will check your scene’s gamma and
adjust accordingly. If this is disabled, you can manually enable/disable gamma correction to
emulate linear working space.
Style: Chromatic Aberration
Separates the individual color channels of the glows source. Choose View: Glow Input to see
the effect this has on the input. Note this produces a different effect to applying chromatic
aberration after Deep Glow.
Style: Tint
Adds a coloured tint to the glow. Choose one of three modes:
1. Standard: multiply the chosen colour over the glow result.
2. Overlay: much more vibrant, identical to the after effects overlay blending mode.
3. Soft light: as above but softer, less saturated.
Quality: Downsample
The amount to downsample each iteration of the glow. Lower values produce more grainy
results but render faster. A value of 80% (the default) is barely distinguishable from 100%
(full quality) but renders noticeably quicker. Increase from 80% if you notice temporal noise in
your animations.
Quality: Steps
The number of steps used in the glow. This is a multiplier of the number of steps which the
plugin automatically chooses based on your radius. Lower values produce more grainy or
‘digital’ results but render faster.
Quality: Iterations
The number of glow iterations. Recommended to keep this set to auto, unless you’re dealing
with very fine detail.
If Auto Iterations is disabled, choose higher values for larger radii and lower values for lower
radii.
Quality: Dither
Large radii and desaturated images are prone to banding artifacts. Dither helps smooth out
this banding by introducing variance in the image. Enable this and increase the amount to
reduce banding.
Dither: Monochromatic
Enable this to use a monochrome dither. By default this is turned off which will result in a
coloured dither.
View:
Choose to view the glow’s input, or final render. Viewing the input is useful when modifying:
threshold, threshold smooth, exposure, chromatic aberration, and quality: downsample.
Source Opacity:
The opacity of the input placed atop the render using the user-defined blend mode. Choose
0% to view the glow only (no input).
Unmult:
Generate an alpha channel. Otherwise the glow will be rendered on a black background.
For more products (including some free!) and tutorials, checkout plugineverything.com