Real Lens Flare

FOOTER PANE

You’ve made it all the way through creating your custom lens flare. Now, it’s time to deliver the flare back into your After Effects project. Head down to the footer pane located in Designer’s bottom-right corner.

• The gear wheel brings up a list of Lens Designer settings, of which there is currently exactly one. We recommend leaving “Show Tooltips” enabled.
• The Help button will take you to Maxon’s web support page.
• Cancel will prompt you to leave Designer, along with a warning about saving your work.
• Confirm will close designer and render your lens flare into After Effects.

As you can see, there are many ways to use Real Lens Flares and many paths you can take from the default home screen to a finished lens flare creation. At least half of the time, though, our workflow commonly boils down to these few steps:

1. Begin by selecting a stylized flare preset.
2. Adjust the light source to approximate the light values of the source in the original footage.
3. Move to the projection strip. Hide, add, and/or modify each core projection and reflection in turn to achieve the desired nuances.
4. If time allows, pay special attention to the starburst and reflection settings. More often than not, these are the top priorities in lens flare awesomeness.
5. Create a custom lens flare for this creation.
6. Hit Confirm and begin working with the lens flare in After Effects.