Create Better Glows in After Effects

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for school of motion. And in this lesson, we'll be taking a look at how to build a better glow effect than what after effects has to offer us right out of the box. The built-in glow effect that comes with after effects is really clunky to use and limits the looks you can achieve the way that I'm going to show you how to build a glow effect will give you a lot more flexibility to really dial in the look you're going for. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from other lessons on the site. Now let's jump in. So I have a comp set up here and there's one layer in it, which is this Photoshop file. And I picked this Photoshop file because it has a lot of contrast in it.
Joey Korenman : And when you have images with lots of contrast, um, especially when you shoot these things on, on film, a lot of times you'll get natural gloves and that's why compositors and motion graphics artists add glows a lot to these types of images. Um, I also chose this image because it's very, very saturated. And when you add glows to images like this, there's a lot of problems you can run into. Um, and I'm going to show you how to deal with those and, and some better ways and cool effects you can get using this technique. So to start with, I want to show you the way most people go about adding a glow. Um, and when I say most people, I mean, most beginners that I've worked with in other freelancers, um, and people who don't know how to do this new technique, which I wish everyone knew how to do.
Joey Korenman : Um, so what I'm gonna do is go up to effect and I'm just gonna add stylize glow. All right. So there you go. There's your glow. Now, the first thing I don't like about the glow effect is that it's not that easy to dial in the look you want. So the, what the settings are called on this glow effect are not that intuitive. Now I know what they are because I've used this many, many times. Um, so Lee, you know, let's say that I, I, I want a little less glow here, so I would bring down the intensity. Right? Okay. But now I want the glow to come out further. So I would increase the radius, but now I'm noticing that there are things glowing than I don't want, like this area here, this white area on this red pyramid. So I figured out, okay, well maybe that's the threshold, the threshold set too low.
Joey Korenman : So I need to raise that. So I'm gonna raise that up. But in doing that, I've actually lowered the intensity as well. So now I need to crank that back up. So it's this constant dance to get the look you want. And then at the end of it, let's say, I want the red pyramid to glow more than the green pyramid. Um, I can't do that unless I, you know, maybe break this up into layers or create some adjustment layers, but then that creates its own problems. Um, and you know, and then there's not, there's not that many settings as to what I can do with these colors. Let's say, um, I want it to de saturated these colors. Well, there's really no good way to do that. So, um, what I'm going to do is delete this, and I'm going to show you one more problem with the glow effect, um, which is actually a bigger problem.
Joey Korenman : In my opinion, if I add the glow effect, uh, to this layer, and all I've done is created a quick little comp to show you guys, uh, with just a shape layer in it on a gray background. Um, I'm going to add the glow effect to this layer. You'll see now it's glowing. Um, and we can control the radius and everything we can before. Now, let's say we wanted to animate this glow from off to on, um, well, if I just bring the intensity down to zero, look at this, we get this little buddy, this little black halo around our layer that we don't want. Um, and to get rid of that, we also have to bring the radius down to zero. So when you animate this on, you're not just animating a glow on, you're also having to shrink and grow the glow. So it's not a great effect to animate either.