EDGE GLOW

Create a glowing effect on image edges and outlines. Perfect for titles and logos with controls for glow, brightness, saturation, and tint.

Presets

Edge Glow offers eight presets that apply ready-made combinations of the tool's key controls. Find these

via the blue Open Dashboard... button or the Choose a Preset... button below it.

As with all other Universe tools, you can modify or create an Edge Glow look and then save it under its own name by pressing the Save Preset... button.

Modify the Effect

Edge Detect finds the outlines within the image which the glow will affect. Smaller, more detailed edges are highlighted by the glow when Edge Detect values are raised toward 1000.
Glow Radius expands or shrinks the glow from the brightest areas. Edge glows become more pronounced when raising this control, but higher glows can also diffuse your effect, so increase cautiously.
Brightness increases the brightness and occurrence of the glowing areas. Lowering this slider diminishes glowing areas.

Let's pause for a moment to explore how Edge Detect and Brightness interplay. Imagine you're producing a short video for a client in the agriculture space and you want to accentuate the borders between various fields. You load your aerial footage clip and drop Edge Glow onto it. With all default values, you'll see something like this:

It looks pretty normal, right? You have to toggle Edge Glow on and off to tell that there's an effect happening here. At this point, you could change your Tint Color (see below) to bright purple and you still wouldn't be able to see much difference. That's likely because you haven't checked the Colorize box yet. Here's the difference checking Colorize makes after selecting a bright purple tint but otherwise keeping default values:

The result is fine but definitely not the pop we wanted. Increasing Glow Radius at this point will only diffuse the color and arguably detract from the effect. So, let's bring Edge Detect way up — say, to 500.

So much better, right? But what if we bring Edge Detect back to 100 and knock Brightness up to 500? Then you get this:

The two images are practically indistinguishable. However, that doesn't mean the two are equally weighted and balanced. To illustrate, with Glow Radius kept at 50, here are Edge Detect: 500/Brightness: 50 (left) versus Edge Detect: 50/Brightness: 500.
Use the Saturation slider to increase color intensity or desaturate color inside the glow.
When enabled, the Colorize checkbox applies the Tint Color selected below to your glow.
Tint Color lets you change the glow's color for better compositing and special effects.
Turning the Opacity slider down from 100 will lower the overall transparency of the effect on the layer and help to "calm" a dramatic edge glow. You might animate Opacity to easily create a pulsing glow.
The Blend Mode drop-down lets you select the blending mode used to composite the Edge Glow result over the original image.
Use the Premult checkbox for easy compositing. When enabled, this checkbox makes the layer's alpha channel transparent, allowing you to composite the layer over background footage.