How To Use The Sapphire S_Ultraglow OpenFX

August 16, 2022

In Part 2 of Jason Bowdach's series on glow effects, get a close look at the Sapphire S_UltraGlow and the additional options it offers.


Series

Working with Glows: Part 2

As we discussed in part 1 of this series, glows are an extremely popular and versatile effect, and the included default Glow Resolve FX (found in the Resolve FX Light category) is fast, efficient, and quick to set up. Unfortunately, its greatest strength is its greatest weakness, in that it can be limited by its simplicity –  which is where third-party OFX plug-ins fill the gap.

In this Insight, we get our feet wet using the third-party OFX filter Sapphire UltraGlow (also known as S_UltraGlow). After a brief walkthrough of the important controls and adjustments available within the effect, we’ll discuss some artistic methods we can utilize during the grading process, along with how it compares to the included ResolveFX Glow.

Key Takeaways from this Insight

After watching this Insight you will:

  1. Learn the difference between the built-in glow and third-party OFX filters
  2. Remove the “fiddle until it looks good” mentality and provide a repeatable approach to using this third-party FX, along with other Sapphire OFX
  3. Understand which plugin sections you can avoid when color correcting and finishing.

External Resources

Related Mixing Light Insights

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Comments

Homepage Forums How To Use The Sapphire S_Ultraglow OpenFX


  • Ulli Burger
    Member

    For a medium that particularly wants to demonstrate and educate about nuances in a visual medium, the harsh compressed screen recordings are simply unacceptable and not supporting your case.
    What exactly am I supposed to distinguish here? If one is not absolute indifferent and settles with the static frames, I would say the experience is overall not great. At least, the quality of the screen recording should have top priority.


    • Patrick Inhofer
      Administrator

      @Ulli – Thanks for reporting this problem. I missed relinking the screen capture to the full-res version before exporting. The video has been updated. This should get you what you’re expecting.

      @Neil – Looking at the time-stamp of your comment, you viewed the updated version of this video – which is indeed clean.


      • Ulli Burger
        Member

        great, perfect quality! Thank you for checking!

  • Interesting … I didn’t see any harshly compressed screen … watched it on a 32″ UHD monitor, and the visual was quite useful. Nothing clipped, nothing crushed, a lot of subtle shadow and highlight details throughout.


  • Marc Wielage
    Member

    This is a terrific look at a seldom-discussed area: 3rd party OFX resolve plug-ins. Boris & Sapphire are the secret weapons we use when a client turns to us and says, “what else you got?” Being able to use something like Sapphire UltraGlow is a great thing to have in the toolset, and Jason presents the ideas very clearly and logically. It takes more time (and costs more) than the stock ResolveFX Glow, but it’s always good to have options. Colorists looking to step up to the next level should look at stuff like the Boris/Sapphire stuff — there’s some really unusual tools there that can save the day on occasion.

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