Sparkle effect

[Jim Dodson]

The plug-in you want is Trapcode’s Starglow

A terribly inelegant work-around would be to use CC Light Rays — and motion track the jewelry one item at a time; then paste that motion tracking data into the CENTER field of CC Light Rays.

Alternatively, RENDER–> GLOW and adjust threshold until it gives a nice diffuse “glow” around the jewells — not the same as a sparkle — that’s exactly what Starglow would give you…

[Chris Smith]

Or you can just simulate Starglow. It’s extremely simple (unless you want to incorporate ALL the features).

Here’s How:

1. Duplicate the footage. Add hue/sat to it. Use this to pull out all the saturation. Then add a Levels. Crush down the blacks and gammas agressively. Then clip the whites a bit. The point being, you don’t want to see greyscale anymore, you just want the very brightest bits to be white and everything else black. Add a Gaussian blur to this layer. Except make the blur horizontal only. Now crank the blur waaay up. Now add a glow effect. Change the glow colors to hues you like.

Now Duplicate this layer with these effects on it. On the second layer, change the gauss blur to be vertical-only instead of horizontal.

Now set these two additional layers to SCREEN transfer mode. Now you have a starfilter effect on only the lightest parts of the image.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Jim Dodson]

Wow!! That was elegant and superb!! I just tried it — worked great!!

[Chris Smith]

🙂

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Randall Bennett]

I cheated some rendertime out of this using directional blur. I think its marginally faster than gauss.

help me out dude!

[Chris Smith]

Cool. I was assuming it would be worse. The good thing then is, you can write a nice little expression linked to a slider to rotate the directional blur on the 2 layers so the sparkles rotate.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Sanjay Sheth]

Dear Chris,

I have done one jewellery rendering, and wish to add sparkle effects on the diamond only, i tried following your tutorial on this post, but iwant to use trapcode starglow as you had advised, do i need to duplicate layer , add hue/sat and then gauusian blurr if i use trapcode star glow ? I tried that but not getting desired effect, my whole ring starts to glow and have starts, instead of just diamonds can you pls guide.

regds
Sanjay