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— Anamorphism: Lets you deform the reflection elements to simulate an anamorphic lens’ stretching effect.
— Global Colorize: Lets you adjust the color intensity of the reflections, either intensifying the color of all reflections or desaturating it.
Presets
A Presets pop-up provides a number of different settings to get you started. Selecting a preset populates the Reflecting Elements parameters below, at which point you can customize the effect to work best with the image at hand. It’s highly recommended to customize these effects to suit the type of highlights in your image, in order to get the best results.
Reflecting Elements
There are four groups of Reflecting elements, each with identical controls. This lets you create interactions combining up to four sets of reflections. The controls found within each group are as follows.
— Brightness: Lets you adjust the intensity of that reflection.
— Position in Optical Path: Lets you shift the reflection according to an element’s position in the lens. Practically, this means that positive values will enlarge an inverted reflection based on the highlights, while reducing values toward 0 will shrink the reflection, and pushing this into negative values will invert the reflection and pull it into the opposite direction as it begins to enlarge again. A value of –1 positions the reflection right over the highlight that creates it.
— Defocus type: Lets you choose what kind of blur to use, choices include Box blur, Triangular blur, Lens blur (the most processor intensive), and Gaussian blur (the default).
— Defocus: Lets you choose how much to blur that element.
— Stretch: Lets you give the flare an anamorphic widescreen look.
— Stretch Falloff: Lets you taper the edges for a less uniform stretching effect.
— Lens Coating: A pop-up lets you choose common colors such as purple, green, and yellow that correspond to different anti-reflective lens coatings, as well as a selection of other vibrant colors. Defaults to none. When you choose any other option, a color control and eyedropper let you manually choose a color or pick one from the image. A Colorize slider lets you vary how much to tint the reflection by the selected color, although setting Colorize to 0 lets the flare take its color from the source highlights of the image, which can sometimes give you the most interesting look.
Light Rays
A “rays of light” effect that simulates volumetric lighting emerging from light sources defined by a threshold you define. The effect mimics what are sometimes called “god rays” in the sky, or other highly directional glow effects.
Main Controls
The Main controls include: