Lensflares… Again!
Most lens flare plugins are just layering bitmaps and sprites on top of each other. There’s even an iPhone app that basically mimics Video Copilot’s Optical Flares for 0,79 cent…
If you’re sneaky you can just grab these images. I’ve spent a few minutes to draw some basic flare images in Photoshop though. Just some repeated radial or directional blur on a few bright pixels. Then you can add these on top of your image in linear color space. The plugins all have simple mechanisms to move the flares around, but you can do that in Fusion as well. If you use the Lens flare Fuses I’ve written, they provide a published position output to connect those shapes to. Also, you can use expressions that move a bitmap on the same X position but mirrored on the Y axis.
I have made an example comp along with all the images. Of course these would need some more fine-tuning to make sure there’s no banding and the gradients look right in linear color space. But it’s a start 🙂 The comp also includes a technique to create an edge flare that briefly appears when the light source touches the image borders. You can modify this to define any area you like where flares are hidden/shown.
Download lensflare_images_v02.zip
Tags: Fusion
