Hi everyone.
This is Will at Undu Media.
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a dreamy glow effect in Adobe Premiere Pro.
So, this a fairly easy but very cool way
to add a glow effect to pretty much any footage in post.
And there's really no end to the types of glow styles you can create.
I’ve got a short before-and-after sequence set up here already
to give you an idea of the some of the types of glows that are possible with this effect.
So, let’s give that a look.
There are a lot of different scenarios where you might want to use this effect.
For dream sequences. Or flashbacks.
Or if you’re just going for a romantic or ethereal look.
And with a little finessing you create some pretty dramatic results.
Generally, you’ll get a more vivid glow with higher contrast or side-lit shots.
And a more subtle, balanced glow with flatter footage.
And the more movement in your video
the more that glow will naturally dance around.
But with a little extra work you can give even fairly static shots
a more dynamic, organic-looking glow effect.
And I’ll show you how to do that too.
Alrighty. So, let’s dive into this.
I’ve got another sequence set up here with a couple of the clips from that before and after.
The first is sort of dark and moody and dramatic.
And the second is a little brighter and dreamier.
And I’ve already added a quick-and-dirty color grade to each of these.
You can grade your footage any way you like.
But I want my glow to be really obvious for this tutorial
maybe even a little over the top
considering the different device displays you might be watching this on.
So, I selected a pretty high contrast look for each of these in the Creative panel of Lumetri
and just made a few basic corrections to each of the clips.
Alright. So I’m going to break this effect down into three parts.
First, we’ll add our basic glow
which will predominantly affect the brightest areas of our footage.
Then we’ll add some blur to soften things up a little.
And lastly, I’ll show you how to bring it all to life even more
with some simple keyframe animation.
To start, we’ll go into the Effects panel and search for “VR Glow”.
And I’ll drag that effect over onto my first clip.
This VR Glow effect will allow us to isolate
and play with the highlight colors in our video footage.
And over in the Effect Controls panel
we’ve got a number of parameters we can adjust for this effect.
Luma Threshold defines the areas in the image that will have our glow applied.
Zero being black.
And one being white.
The lower the value, the greater the range of brightness (or luma)
in the original image that will be affected.
So, as I bring this down, some of the darker areas are included in our glow.
And as I bring it back up, we target only the brightest areas of the clip.
Glow Radius controls how much of a feather (or halo) we want on our glow.
Glow Brightness is pretty obvious...
how bright we want our glow.
And Glow Saturation controls the color intensity.
If we drop this down to zero
our glow will basically be solid white.
And as we increase this, it’ll become more and more saturated
based on the color of the underlying footage.
We can also add a color tint to this.
If I check Use Tint Color
and select a different color
I can basically colorize my glow.
So, you can play around with all these parameters...
try different tint colors...
adjust the threshold...
the glow radius...
brightness and saturation...
to create a wide variety of very different glow styles.
Alright... Auto VR Properties.
Long story short.
This VR Glow effect is part of a group of immersive video effects
included in Premiere Pro that are really intended for use with 360 video.
And unchecking “Auto VR Properties”
exposes a few other parameters
that can be manually set for that type of footage
You’re not going to want to touch Frame Layout.
This parameter is related to 360 video stitching.
But you might want to play with the other controls.
The Horizontal and Vertical Fields of View settings
can change how your blur looks around the edges of the frame.
Sometimes quite a bit.
So, again, you can try different settings here as well.
depending on how much you want your glow to bleed out at the edges.
And this is definitely one of those types of effects you’re going to want to play around with.
There's no one set of values I can give you that will work on all footage.
It really depends on the color composition of your video
and exactly what type of glow you’re looking for.
And keep in mind...
you can also come back into the Lumetri Color panel...
and really dial in your contrast or highlights...
or saturation...
to get exactly the look you want.
Alright, so next...
I’ll show how to soften out your glow
and make the whole image a little dreamier
even in the darker areas.
And I’ll use this next clip.
The difference will be a little easier to pick up here.
I’ll drag that VR Glow effect onto this clip as well.
And for this clip, I’m going to change the order of these effects.
You can get very different results if you apply the VR Glow before or after any color grading.
Remember, effects are always applied in order from top to bottom
as they appear in the Effect Controls window.
So, you can apply an effect to graded footage.
Or, as I’m doing for this clip,
grade your footage after the glow effect is applied.
So, that looks pretty good.
Next, I’ll come back into Effects
and type in "Gaussian Blur".
I’ll drag that effect onto my clip.
And over in the Effect Controls panel
we’ll bring the Blurriness up.
And to get rid of this inner shadow around the edges of the frame
turn on Repeat Edge Pixels.
Then I’m going to add an ellipse mask to this effect.
And click Inverted.
I’ll select that mask...
and I’m going to move it over to the focal point of this shot.
In this case, the girl’s face.
I'll scale that up a bit.
And make a few adjustments.
And I’m not worried about being too precise here.
We’re going to crank that Mask Feather way up.
And if you use the slider it may max out at a lower value than this effect actually allows.
Sometimes these values can ago a lot higher than the sliders show
by dragging right on the numbers or just entering a value here.
We'll increase the mask expansion here a little.
And we can also reduce the Opacity to blend that blur in a little better.
So, now we've given this a nice soft glow...
including some of the darker areas and outside edges of the frame.
So... VR Glow by itself.
VR Glow with the Gaussian Blur effect applied.
Okay, so the last thing I’ll show you is how to really fine-tune all of this if you want.
All these effect parameters we just set can be animated with keyframes.
So, I can click the stopwatch beside any of these to set a keyframe
And then add new keyframes elsewhere in the timeline
with different values
to animate my glow over time.
So, for example, I could increase or decrease the Luma Threshold as this plays.
And we could do the same with all of these effect parameters
to give even a relatively static shot like this
a pretty interesting, pretty dynamic glow effect.
And we can apply the same keyframe animation approach to our Gaussian Blur effect.
If there’s movement in our footage
we can animate this mask to track that motion.
Or even just randomly move the mask around a bit
to add some subtle variations to our glow.
It's just a question of how much time you want spend keyframing various parameters to suit your footage.
So, if I come back to that before-and-after sequence I showed you earlier,
you can see how I’ve keyframed all these parameters to bring this glow effect to life a little more.
Keep an eye on these sliders and values
and the mask on the Gaussian Blur as I scrub through this.
So, with a little extra work keyframing things
you can make your glow dance around
even if the there’s not a lot of movement in the footage itself.
Alright, folks. That’s all for me today.
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