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— Alpha Masks Light Sources: Check this box to use the input Alpha channel to exclude sources in those areas from casting light rays.
— Alpha Limits Effect: Check this box to use the input Alpha channel for compositing purposes. Unchecking means the input Alpha is ignored.
— Quality: Lets you choose a quality setting to trade off between quality and speed. Choices are Full, Half (Faster), Quarter (Fast). High quality gives diffraction of finer detail, but otherwise does not change the effect. If you have no small light point sources, you can safely use half or quarter qualities with no reduction in image quality.
Isolation Controls
The Isolation controls let you choose which highlights in the scene generate visible glow and patterns. The effect of these controls can be directly monitored by setting Select Output to Isolated Source.
— Color Mode: A pop-up menu that lets you either choose to keep the colors of the different highlight regions that generate glow, or treat them all as grayscale brightness only (color controls later can change the effect). Grayscale is faster to process, but Color can result in some brilliant effects.
— Brightness: Sets the threshold at which highlights are isolated.
— Gamma: Lets you shape the isolated highlights.
— Smooth: Lets you blur details in the highlights that you don’t want to be pronounced.
— Color Filter: Lets you choose a particular color of highlight to isolate (an eyedropper lets you select a value from the Viewer).
— Operation: Lets you adjust the resulting Isolation matte (options include Shrink, Grow, Opening, Closing) with a slider to define how much.
Aperture Controls
The Aperture controls let you define the shape and texture of the resulting glow this plugin creates.
— Iris Shape: Lets you choose a shape that determines how many arms the star pattern will have. Options are Triangle, Square, Pentagon, Hexagon, Heptagon, and Octagon.
— Aperture Size: Lets you alter the resulting diffraction pattern alternating between more of a star shape at higher values and a stippled wave pattern at lower values.
— Blade Curvature and Rotation: Lets you alter the softness and orientation of the arms of each star.
— H/V Ratio: Alters the horizontal/vertical ratio of the aperture, allowing you to replicate an anamorphic glow.
— Angle: Sets the angle of the aperture.
— Chroma Shift: Lets you introduce some RGB “bleed” into the glow.
Diffraction Controls
— Result Gamma: Lets you adjust how pronounced will be the glow that appears between the arms of the star patterns that appear.
— Result Scale: Lets you alternate between pronounced star patterns at high values and more diffuse glows at low values.