[Sean Cunningham]

The working space doesn’t actually effect the values except for how they’re displayed. Setting your working space to a higher gamut setting is/should be more a function of your monitors capabilities. My monitor is rated at 100% sRGB. This is an export problem and not a working space problem.

I know this to be a fact because I can write the comp out as EXR, read it back into After Effects and it still has all the extra stops of detail in the highlights. I can read these EXRs into Nuke and write DPX that read back in and look identical to the EXR while also retaining the extra stops of highlight information that After Effects clips if I write the same comp as DPX.

And today I confirmed that I can read the EXR into Natron, the Open Source Nuke clone, drop a write node, set output space to Cineon and those DPX read back in looking identical to the EXR while retaining the extra stops of highlight information that After Effects is clipping out when I try to write DPX.

I’m going to see if perhaps switching to a workflow that utilizes Fnord’s Open Color plugins, rather than relying on Adobe’s color management, solves the issue since my understanding is it can be told to process color consistent with Nuke as well.

[Sean Cunningham]

A copy of the key mask for the foreground subjects either has a ‘stroke’ applied, which grows it out by some number of pixels, or has parameters applied to the matte choker effect to grow, rather than shrink, a copy of the mask. You would then apply either the glow filter to the mask, giving it a saturated color to fall off to or you build your glow using multiple copies of the enlarged mask with varying degrees of blur applied and layered with with the Add transfer mode.

Assuming you’ve pre-comped or pre-written your grown/stroked mask to disc, working in a 32bit, linear light project, the logic for a composite might look something like this:

foreground layer — Normal
stroked mask (tint effect applied with near white color; fast/box/gaus blur with tight radius) — Add
stroked mask (tint effect applied with lower saturation color; fast/box/gaus blur with medium radius) — Add
stroked mask (tint effect applied with deep, saturated color; fast/box/gaus blur with big, soft radius) — Add
Background Layer

…and then you balance the levels of your “glow layers” with a combination of layer Opacity and possibly an Exposure effect applied to the layer. I generally prefer this method to using the Glow filter, though I’ve also gotten good results layering multiple glow filters. You basically want a hot, almost white core with some kind of saturated falloff in color. Even if you only have a hint of color, perceptually hot, near white rolling off to some color looks brighter than white rolling off to just soft white. White falling off to soft white looks like diffusion, not like a really bright light.