Real Lens Flares
One of the great things about Maxon One and the Red Giant suite is having agnostic choice over the host in which to run those tools. Our documentation focuses on running within Adobe After Effects, but there are other options, including the increasingly popular and capable DaVinci Resolve.
If you're a Resolve user, take a moment to compare Real Lens Flares under these two platforms and be aware of a couple of important current caveats.
Below, we have the Inspector pane in DaVinci Resolve showing the Real Lens Flares settings (left) set alongside essentially the same settings panel in the Effect Controls Panel in Adobe After Effects (right).
As you can see, the two implementations are nearly identical in their parameters and order only one notable exception. Real Lens Flares Obscuration is only supported within Resolve's Fusion page. Obscuration options aren't visible in the Edit page. Interestingly, they are visible in the Color page (shown below), but all Obscuration options are grayed out and inaccessible.
For details on using Obscuration in Fusion, see that section below on this page.
The Designer UI in both hosts is indistinguishable. In the side-by-side view below, can you tell which is in Resolve and which is After Effects? Exactly.
Within the Edit page, you can add a Real Lens Flares effect by dropping the effect onto your selected clip, same as usual.
Note that you may not see the position handle (the little circle you can drag with your mouse around the preview) at the flare's center. The best way to activate this is to make sure you have Open FX Overlay selected in the On-Screen Controls Menu pull-down.
You can also add a flare (or multiple flares) in the Color interface by dropping the effect on your desired node. The new flare(s) will feature the control handle, as shown below.
Obscuration allows certain image areas to behave like solid objects and block a lens flare's light in familiar, realistic ways. In the example we've been using here, the factory smokestacks can be made to behave such that the flare, imitating the Sun, blocks the light as each stack passes over the flare during the clip. Let's break down the process.
In the image above, we begin in the Fusion page, then search for "flare" in the Effects tab. We then drag the resulting Real Lens Flares tool from the results pane and drop it into the connection between our MediaIn and MediaOut nodes. This generates the default flare in our preview window along with the tool's parameters in the Inspector pane.
Obscuration requires a significant difference in brightness values to register as a light-blocking object. In the clip we're using, the factory isn't dark relative to the sky to reliably make this distinction. If you were to put the flare on a smokestack, the flare wouldn't diminish at all.
One solution is to add a Brightness/Contrast node into the workflow, like so:
To get that stark distinction between bright sky and solid foreground object, we need to modify some control values. Below, notice how we nudged down the node's Gain, dropped the Gamma, took the Saturation down to 0, and maxed out Contrast. Now, we have truly black structures and still have a well-lit sky.
However, as you can see, our flare still appears to be shining brightly in front of the factory. There's one critical step left.
Click on the Real Lens Flares node. In the Inspector, and within the Obscuration settings, make sure you have Luminance selected, since luminance difference is effectively the mechanism we've set up for defining our "solid object" that will block our flare. Enable the Invert checkbox.
And that's it! We positioned the flare's center between those two smokestacks so you can still see a bit of flare peeking through, but most of the light is clearly being obscured.