- With Sapphire 2021,
one of the most popular Sapphire effects as glow has evolved
with the same famous S glow core algorithm,
which has been wowing Sapphire uses for years being updated
to create a brand new effect called UltraGlow.
So in this tutorial,
I'm gonna introduce you to UltraGlow
and show you how you can use it to enhance footage
and motion graphics.
So let's get started.
(soft music)
- Okay, so you may be wondering
how Sapphire UltraGlow differs from Sapphire Glow.
So I thought the best thing to do would be to start
with a comparison where we look at them side by side.
So I've got the exact same candle here
on the left and right,
first of all, I'm gonna select layer one glow
and come up to the effects and presets panel
and double click to apply Sapphire Glow.
So this adds that lovely, typical Sapphire Glow
around the flame.
Let's make some adjustments.
I'm gonna increase the brightness to four
and the glow width to 150,
and I'm just going to bring with green
and with blue down to one.
So that gives us this lovely glow around the flame,
but that's, as far as it goes.
It doesn't really enhance the shot beyond the flame.
So let's now compare that to UltraGlow.
So I'm gonna select the UltraGlow layer
type in ultra into the effects and presets panel
and double click S UltraGlow.
Now, when you're using UltraGlow,
you may prefer to start with one of the many presets
that ships with Sapphire,
but for this look, we're gonna start
with the default settings.
And notice even at its default settings,
it's already giving us a softer, more diffuse glow,
than Sapphire Glow.
Let's make some adjustments.
Now, as you'd expect, Sapphire UltraGlow
has way more parameters than Sapphire Glow,
and these have been organized into these logical categories.
So we're going to start at the top with Primary Glow,
but in order to see what Primary Glow is doing,
first of all, I'm gonna bring After Glow down to zero
and just twirl that up and open Primary Glow
and set brightness to two,
just drop the threshold slightly to point three five,
and increase the glow width.
And UltraGlow includes more options for the glow,
including things like fall off and bias.
If I decrease the fall off,
you can see it spreads that glow out,
gives you really precise control
and bias will increase the intensity of the glow.
I'm just gonna leave those at the defaults for now,
because next I want to add some After Glow.
And this is one of my favorite features of UltraGlow.
It allows us to add a soft secondary globe
and also add a secondary color
for some really lovely results.
So let's change the color first,
I'm gonna choose a just a deep orange
and we'll bring the After Glow width by up to 300.
And you can see now how it's not only affecting the flame
as S Glow does,
but it's also giving us this lovely, rich orange glow
that falls off gently around the edge of the candle.
I'm gonna change After Glow stretch X,
just drop that to zero
and bring After Glow stretch Y up to point five.
So let's start to stretch the After Glow,
I'm gonna bring horizontal streaks down to zero,
but bring vertical streaks right up to one.
And that adds this finer vertical streak,
which is including the flame as well.
So you can see side by side
how the After Glow really enhances this shot
beyond simply adding the glow to the flame.
And it even enhances the subsurface scattering created
around here where the light passes through the candle.
Okay, so now let's build the text example
where we can explore UltraGlow's edge and highlight options.
And we'll start using the Text Start comp,
if you've downloaded the project file
inside that we have another composition named TextBase,
and here I've just created a simple text animation just
with a few key frames,
so with that layer selected,
once again, I'm going to double click to apply UltraGlow,
and first of all, let's set up our Primary Glow.
I'll just twirl that up for a moment connect After Glow
and just zero that out.
Okay, so for Primary Glow,
first of all we'll set the color nice sky blue,
see here with the After Glow off,
it allows us to concentrate on the Primary Glow,
we'll bring threshold down to zero, glow with up to 17
and glow bias to point seven.
That'll give us this nice hot glow.
Now to have the glow only apply to the edges,
we're going to use UltraGlow's edges feature.
So first of all, check edge detect,
and we'll also need to change edge combined from screen
to edges only.
Now we start to get that more neon style.
I'm gonna fatten that out a little bit
by changing edge smooth to three,
and now we can adjust the After Glow.
So first of all, changing After Glow color to a deeper blue,
something like that,
and we kind of see it yet because the width is set to zero.
I'm gonna change that to 200 and make stretch X zero,
and just stretch Y zero,
vertical streaks zero,
and this time I'm gonna add some horizontal streaks,
set that to two.
That's very nice.
So next I want to apply that glow only
to certain highlights on the text.
And for that I can use UltraGlow's highlights feature.
So first of all, I'll check highlights to turn it on,
but just drag the current time indicator,
you can see the highlights feature gives us
some automatic animated highlights on the text.
And this is said to animate by default
because highlights speed by default is set to one.
If you wanna do the highlights to be stationary,
just set that to zero.
But most of the time you'll probably want
to have some kind of spit on that,
it's designed to give you
that lovely moving glint look across your text and logos.
Now there are various settings that you can use
to control the amount of highlights, their position
and the overall appearance.
I'm gonna set highlight frequency rel X to two,
and just drop the highlight threshold slightly.
So if we just do a quick preview,
you can see that edges combined with the highlights
is a really great way to easily create animated highlights
on the edges.
And we haven't had to use any keyframes.
Now, although UltraGlow does come
with its own atmosphere settings,
we're not gonna use them here,
but rather we're gonna apply atmosphere
using Sapphire rays.
I'm just going to search for S rays
and just a quick tip in after effects
as long as there's only one effect found when you search,
you can hit the Enter key to apply that
to your selected layer.
Now there's only a few adjustments we wanna make
to the rays.
First of all, increase rays length to one.
Now I want this to be a little more subtle,
so first of all, I'll come down and twirl open atmosphere
and increase the amplitude to eight
and you can see that's really blown out.
So we need to come up to threshold and just drag that amount
and just knock this back a little bit just to about this.
We definitely wanna see the rays,
but it's more about revealing
that smokiness in the environment,
obviously dropping rays directly onto texts
and really making the settings high
can look a little bit cliched.
That's nice.
As those highlights move around,
you can see it reveals the rays,
which reveals the atmosphere.
So next let's comp this with a black version of the text.
So I'm going to just twirl this up and duplicate this layer,
and for the bottom one,
I'm just going to press E and delete both of those,
once again, come up to effect some presets
and type in fill and add the full effects,
that's just gonna fill the white text with red,
I wanna make that black and select the top layer
and change the blend mode from normal to multiply.
That's looking good.
Now we've got kind of a silhouetted effect
where we have this light source behind the silhouetted text,
but we need to now use an adjustment layer with UltraGlow
and rays to start to wrap this glow
or this light around this black layer.
Because at the moment it looks completely separated.
And by using an adjustment layer,
we'll be able to give it more of a composite look.
I'm gonna press Ctrl+Alt+Y that's command option Y on Mac
and Shift+Ctrl+Y or Shift command Y on Mac
to open up the solid settings,
just name this UltraGlow Rays always a good idea
to name your adjustment rays,
apply UltraGlow again,
and you can already see how adding that UltraGlow layer
above everything is already making these two text layers
feel more integrated.
I want to just decrease this glow a little bit
and introduce an extra color.
So I'm going to change the Primary Glow just
to something a little more pink,
with that
and you can see if I just rolling with my mouse wheel,
you can see how that's actually now a little more pink
is adding a little bit of variation there,
which is really nice,
and bring threshold down a little bit,
maybe point three five,
and we'll just change the After Glow color as well.
Oh, nice, that's really obvious around there.
And finally, let's grab S rays again.
So we'll take the one from the text layer, just copy that,
select the adjustment layer and paste.
And this is a little bit too much,
you can see what I'm trying to do here
by adding the S rays above everything,
then we have the rays looking like they're coming through
and going in front of the text.
Whereas without that effect,
the black layer completely covers all the rays.
We just want to just increase the threshold a little bit,
strike that, I want some rays, but not too much,
maybe something like that.
Okay, so here's the final look again.
So you can see by combining Sapphire's new UltraGlow effect
with Sapphire rays,
you can really bring a boring text animation to life.
So thanks for watching and be sure to visit borisfx.com
to take a free trial of Sapphire or Continuum,
and to see more videos about all of the Boris FX products.