3/5/2017 How To Make Things Glow In Adobe After Effects ­ Basic Tutorial

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How To Make Things Glow In Adobe A禔�er Effects Latest Tutorials

October 20, 2013 Indiana Jones Face
Tags: A禔�er Effects, Beginner, Rotobrush Melt VFX Tutorial –
Houdini & Adobe
A禔�er Effects
Making a static element in your scene glow February 19, 2017
Premiere Pro
For this tutorial I will be using the same rubber duck footage from the YouTube tutorial, but remember that you can use the very Advanced Colour
same technique to apply a glow effect to any element you want for your own scene. Correction
September 24, 2016
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In order to apply any effect to only parts of your clip, you will first have to separate the elements from your base footage. There are A禔�er Effects?
many ways to separate elements from your footage in Adobe A禔�er Effects and for static elements like the rubber duck, you can January 18, 2015
simply use the masking tool. How To Give Your
Video A Cinematic
First, duplicate your footage layer. Since I will use this layer to separate out only the duck, I will call it ‘Glowing Duck’. You can Look – Colour
rename any layer by selecting it and pressing the Enter key on your keyboard. Then select the masking tool and draw a mask Correction
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Tobias  
@surfacedstudio

More VFX tutorials coming soon. In the
meantime, here's a quick update ­ and a
lot of questions for all of you :D 
youtu.be/77jT60EJiKk

 YouTube  @YouTube

If you do not know how to use masks, go check out my tutorial on Masking in Adobe A禔�er Effects.
A禔�er we applied the mask, your layer will contain nothing but the element we cut out. If we solo the layer, we will only see the
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3/5/2017 How To Make Things Glow In Adobe After Effects ­ Basic Tutorial
A禔�er we applied the mask, your layer will contain nothing but the element we cut out. If we solo the layer, we will only see the  
rubber duck that we drew the mask around. This is perfect as now any effects we apply to this layer will only be applied to the
rubber duck! Tobias  
@surfacedstudio
Next, search for the Glow effect in your Effects & Presets panel and apply it to the layer that contains your masked out element. I #Ad Check out the Fire Breath VFX tutoria
will apply it to the Glowing Duck layer. I created for @intel's vfxcreator.intel.com

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Most parameters of the Glow effect are pretty self explanatory and I recommend that you do play around with them to figure out
what they do and have some fun, but here are the most important ones and what they do:
Glow Based On: you can choose whether to base the glow on the colour (contents) or the alpha channel (outline) of your
footage.
Glow Threshold: this value controls which parts of your layer will glow. A high glow threshold will only have the bright
elements of your layer glow, a low threshold will have darker areas glow as well
Glow Radius: this property controls the size of your glow effect
Glow Intensity: this property determines how strong your glow effect will be
Composite Original: you can choose to place the original element on top or behind the glow effect itself
Glow Operation: the blending mode used for the glow
Glow Colors: you can choose whether to make the actual colours of your layer glow or to create a custom glow using the
Color A and Color B properties
Color A: only applicable when using ‘A & B Colors’ option for the glow colours. This is the inside colour of the custom glow
Color B: only applicable when using ‘A & B Colors’ option for the glow colours. This is the outside colour of the custom glow
Glow Dimensions: defines the direction of your glow to be either horizontal, vertical or both (default)

If you make your glow very large and very intense you might find that A禔�er Effects cannot properly display your glow and it just
becomes weak or even invisible. But fear not! This is caused by a composition setting that we can easily change!
By default, A禔�er Effects uses a colour depth of 8 bits per channel, which is simply not enough to display large smooth gradients
properly. But fortunately you can change the colour depth of your composition.
You need to return to the Project tab and at the bottom of your project window you will see a small ‘8 bcc’ option. ALT-click on this
option twice to change it from 8 to 24 and then to 32 bcc. 32 bit per channel will give A禔�er Effects plenty of colours to work with to
make your gradients appear as intended. Do note that working in 32 bit per channel colour space will make processing a little
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3/5/2017 How To Make Things Glow In Adobe After Effects ­ Basic Tutorial
make your gradients appear as intended. Do note that working in 32 bit per channel colour space will make processing a little
slower. But it’s worth it – check out the massive intense glow I added to my rubber duck!

Now that you are in full control of the glow effect, tweak it as required, feel free to animate the radius, intensity or any other
property as you please and then un-solo the layer to composite your glowing element back onto your original footage. This is what
the glowing duck in my final shot looks like:

Now this was pretty simple! But what if we want to make a moving element glow? Read on to find out how to add a glow effect to a
moving object in your scene!

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6 Comments Tweet Like 0 Share

Atmiya 24 November 2013, 10:03 pm

Hi, i m atmiya.my problem is that when i import audio into the project its look like streched out.it not play as normal rate.
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3/5/2017 How To Make Things Glow In Adobe After Effects ­ Basic Tutorial

Reply
Tobias 11 December 2013, 8:18 am
Can you be more specific? So you are importing an audio file into A禔�er Effects and it plays back at the incorrect speed?

Reply

Bernadette 12 January 2014, 3:23 pm

Thanks, Tobias! Getting started with AE, and this is exactly what I needed. Subscribed and learning. Thank you!

Reply
Tobias 14 January 2014, 1:36 pm
Thank you very much for the support! Great to hear you found my tutorials useful!

Reply

Luthfan 22 May 2015, 10:37 pm

When i finished with rotoscope with rotobrush, i put some glow effect in it and it works on timeline. But when i export it as a video.
The rotobrush effect doesnt want to shown up? What should i do?

Reply
Tobias 2 August 2015, 10:40 am
Are you working in ‘full resolution’ when you apply your roto brush? You are likely using a different resolution in your
timeline and for your final export.

Reply

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