Hi everyone. I’m a somewhat experienced DT user, regular viewer of Boris’s excellent videos, etc.
I really love the warm glowing effect that is created by old lenses, and in experimenting with the D/S module, I have found that it is theoretically possible to reproduce this look, to an extent. I am attaching a JPG that shows what in particular I am talking about; if you look at the reflections off of the top of the milk bottles, you’ll see a nice glow that is in both the chroma and luma channels. This glow is enlarged with the number of iterations that the module runs.
The problem is that D/S is a really difficult module to use the way you want to lol. A side effect of generating this nice glow is that a whole bunch of artifacts are generated, such as haloing, weird RGB rainbows, and others. Many are visible in the attached image.
So, my question is, does anyone know of a way to create this warm lens glow without the side effect of the weird artifacts that I am describing? Thank you all so much in advance!
I’ve tried almost every combination of settings haha… Here’s what I used to generate the JPG which are cranked a little high to be illustrative of both the desired glow and the artifacts. Eliminating the edge threshold increases the glow but introduces a lot of other artifacts which almost look like an oil spill on the image (see other attached pic)
This is just an idea on my part. When I use the shadow and highlights module I find I often minimise artefacts such as halos by using multiple duplicate instances of low values rather than a single instance with large values. I wonder if the same effect could be applied to the bloom preset in DoS or whatever settings you have created.
I just tested this idea on one image using the bloom preset, setting a mask to 25% and duplicate this module four times. It gave a pleasing softening without any artefacts that I could notice. I could also be selective in what parts of the image got the most bloom.
It’s a really interesting idea… This is 5x iterations at 25 percent, it looks almost identical including similar artifacts; less iterations than that don’t produce as pronounced a glow, although it is something I will continue to experiment with… Thanks for the recommendation…
Here’s the image with 4x bloom preset at 25 percent ea… Sorry if I’m being hyper particular here lol, but this one kind of diffuses alot of the detail in the image as well, rather than provide a kind of nice glow in the highest highlights… The one I’m using is an edited version of the “fast” local contrast preset so it preserves and enhances some details… thanks again, I really appreciate your input
Yes like I said I ramped it up a lot so that I could show the glow effect that I desired more clearly, and also the artifacts that can be visible under some circumstances as well. I would usually not use so many iterations, two usually is nice enough looking but still can introduce the weird rgb oil slick effect you have in your image. Here’s an example of a more normal usage applied to the same image, however even in this one some rainbowing and halos are visible if you look closely
this is a very interesting comment. Do you mind explaining to me the difference between mask blend modes? I have kind of blindly experimented with them but I have no idea what they actually do
Earlier I looked at the bloom preset in general… Just sliding the edge sensitivity slider made a tremendous difference in the nature of the bloom and moving the edge threshold to the left in the case of the bloom would enhance and soften it … I feel like many of your examples had them both at 0 so maybe not optimized?? Just maybe revisit those as well…
I learnt most of what I understand about mask blend modes from working with GIMP over the years and the GIMP user manual would be good additional reading on top of the DT manual. Prioritise the DT manual since that is the program you are using.
