Lightracer: This is the one tool of the five that really doesn’t have a real-world application other than imitating cathode ray tube TV’s. If that is important to the work you are doing, check out the digieffects plug-in called Damage. Damage is more versatile for this. However, Lightracer lets you create so many cool, exacting looks that you almost want to find an excuse just to use them. There is a nice collection of controls for the things you’d expect in a rasterizing type of effect: vertical, horizontal, color etc. what makes this a very unique tool is the choice of “dots” or bloom shapes that you have: circle, star, line, hexagon, soft+bright and more. They each have dramatically different presentations. And of course, you have control how much your original imagery is part of the effect.
Luminus: The control options for this tool are pretty standard stuff that you’d expect and encounter with most glow-y types of effects. The exception is the ability to designate the blending method of the glow. This allows you to create realistic lens-type glow on an image or quickly develop some super nice stylized looks while not actually effecting the way the source image integrates or blends with the rest of your work.
Photogust: A tasty “light rays” kind of tool . The center (or “origin”) of the effect can be animated as can all of the color parameters. Being able to individually control the RGB values of the rays is a nice touch. There are some known bugs for Illuma and one of them bites hard on this filter/effect. More than any other effect, I got a black interactive preview screen caused by the known multi-threading bug. This is a problem because you can’t see your last change. Altering one of the settings doesn’t force a refresh. Only closing and reopening the sequence or clicking one of the preset/randomizer buttons does the trick.
Radiance: This effect is worth the price of admission alone. Since I don’t do music videos, subtlety is important in my work. Radiance let’s you create completely synthetic looks that don’t look synthetic. Fake reality - ‘ya gotta love it. The ability to manage RGB threshold, and glow while changing the blurring directions/options and then combining it with a modulating color while controlling how the modulating color composites is fantastic. Radiance is almost worth a complete write up on it’s own because of the versatility and variability. This effect make the ability to save your presets incredibly valuable. Sometimes experimentation to get the “look” takes time. It’s nice to keep it for later.
