General tut: glowing lights in a scene

[Jako]

Some guys asked me how I made the glowing lights in my last scene, so I wrote this tutorial. I hope you can understand it, because my english is really bad

How to turn on the light

All too often you have rendered a scene, but it looks boring and you have the impression, that something is missing. The light looks not really like “light” and also some colors are not good.
To prevent that you have that feeling I wrote this short tutorial. I hope it will help you!



This is the image, how it looks like, after it is rendered. Now I try to turn the light on.
To do this, you have to go in Photoshop (or a similar program) and open your image.

You should select the whole image and copy it in a new layer. What you have to do at first , is to adjust the levels. Go to image/adjustments/levels... and drag the arrow in the middle to the right, until you are content. Then drag the right arrow a bit left so that the whole layer gets brighter. You have to know that all black areas in the image will be transparent. Now you have extracted all the image's brighter areas. Now set the blending mode to “linear dodge”. You will see, that all the dark areas get transparent. Go to filter/Blur/gaussian blur and make sure that preview is turned on. So you can adjust the blur of this layer and give it a glow effect.



Perhaps you want that some objects in the image glow more than others. You simply have to cut out the things, you want to “glow”. I've made an example at the headlights. I want that they glow very strong and have a light blue cast. At first I cut the headlights out. Pay attention that you do not cut them out exactly ,because this would cause problems if you apply the blur later. Then copy the headlights in a new layer and do the same steps as before, but without the gaussian blur. I have changed the color balance so that the headlights are a little bit blue. After that I copied this layer in two new layers. I add a light gaussian blur in the first layer and stronger gaussian blur in the second layer. Now the headlights looks like they should do.



I made the same with the brake discs and the tunnel light.
Here is an overview over the different layers I used:



This tutorial should only be a guidline. Of course you can achieve the same results in different ways, but I hope I could help you with my tutorial and show you one of these ways.

Jako

[insect]

Very nice effect! And the tut's deffinately good: english is ok, even if it wasn't - pics (also nice, btw) speak for themselves.

Dunono' what to say... Congrats, you did a great job.