Blur, Light & Glow Effects
These effects soften a picture or add light to it. The blurs copy a lens or a moving camera, and the glows, flares and leaks copy light spilling across film or a sensor. Bloom and motion blur are mixed in linear light, so bright areas spread the way real light does.
Use them on photos, product shots and video, anything from a soft backdrop behind a title to a music video full of flares. It all renders in your browser, and nothing gets uploaded.
Bloom Effect
Pick it when the lights already in a photo should glow, from neon signs to a red film halation.
Blur Image
Pick it for even softness in every direction, or a blurred backdrop behind a sharp subject.
Motion Blur
Pick it for streaks along one direction, as if the subject or the camera moved during the shot.
Radial Zoom Blur
Pick it for streaks rushing out from the middle of the frame, a sense of speed toward the subject.
Lens Flare
Pick it for one bright light hitting the lens: a glow, a chain of ghosts and an anamorphic streak.
God Rays Effect
Pick it for shafts of light from a point you place, even outside the frame, in colors you choose.
Tilt Shift Effect
Pick it to keep one band sharp and blur the rest, so a city seen from above looks like a model.
Light Leaks
Pick it for soft colored glows drifting in from the edges, like a film camera with a worn seal.
Which blur should you use?
Blur Image is the even, all-round one: a Gaussian blur that's the same strength in every direction, from light smoothing to a heavy haze. Motion Blur smears the picture along one angle, as if it moved while the shutter was open. Radial Zoom Blur streaks outward from the center instead, like zooming the lens during the exposure, and goes from a light pull all the way to warp speed.
Tilt Shift Effect keeps one band of the picture sharp and blurs more the farther you get from it. A real tilt-shift lens tilts the plane of focus. Shoot a street from above that way and it looks like a model village, because we only expect such a shallow depth of field in close-up photos of small things.
How do you make a blur stronger in one part of a photo?
On design forums people ask for this as a blur along a gradient, and that's what the tilt-shift tool does. The blur starts at the edge of the sharp band and builds to full strength across the Taper distance, and Angle turns the band any way you like. Set Focus to 1, Width to 0 and Taper to 1: the bottom edge stays sharp and everything from the middle up is fully blurred. It's a quick way to soften a floor or a shadow as it recedes.
If you'd rather have a blur that fades out around one shape, every effect here has the Mix mask. Pick an Ellipse or a Rectangle, and use Feather, up to 0.5, to widen the soft border where the effect gives way to the untouched picture.
Which blurs keep bright lights bright?
The Gaussian blur here averages color values as they're stored, and that thins a small light out faster than real light would. In a test using the blur's own weights, a 9-pixel white light on a dark ground, 40 out of 255, peaked at 149 after a Radius 5 blur. Worked out in linear light, which is how light actually adds up, the same blur peaked at 190.
The bloom and the directional blur on this page mix in linear light instead, so a lamp or a neon tube keeps its punch. If you've already used a plain blur, a bloom pass on top brings the glow back.
What causes bloom, lens flare and light leaks?
Bloom is light spreading around very bright areas, scattered by the lens and by the eye itself. Bloom Effect picks out whatever is brighter than a Threshold, blurs it and adds it back, so neon and highlights glow. Film has its own red-orange version called halation: light passes through the emulsion, reflects off the film base and comes back. Tint can warm the glow toward that look.
Lens Flare copies light bouncing between the glass elements of a lens. You get a glow, a chain of ghosts across the frame and a halo, plus an anamorphic streak like a widescreen cinema lens. Light Leaks copies a film camera with a failing seal, with warm patches drifting in from the edges, and its Seed brings back the same drift on every export.
How do god rays work?
God rays, or crepuscular rays, are shafts of sunlight you can see because haze, dust or cloud sits between the light and the viewer. Games often fake them in screen space. From each pixel, a shader samples the image along a line toward the light and adds up the brightness it finds, so bright gaps throw streaks across the frame.
God Rays Effect draws its shafts from a point you place, in your own colors, with presets from Dawn to Neon fan. It opens on the Screen blend, so the light only brightens what's under it.
Can a blur be undone?
Not fully. A blur throws fine detail away, and sharpening can only make the edges that are left look crisper. Blurred text is a different story: researchers have read blurred and pixelated words back by matching them against rendered type. So cover anything private with a solid box.