Next I want to create a similar flare to what we just did for
this foreground text before the actual Chrome text in the background.
I want it to happen as it's coming in,
but I want to isolate it around the outline of the text.
This is something that you'll see a lot in these older '80s looking logos.
They'll have these really cool lens flares
going around the edge of this really shiny metallic text.
To do that, we're going to go into the pre-comps and find the Chrome outline pre-comp,
and I'm going to pull that down into the new comp button.
That's basically breeding another pre-comp and this one I'll rename flare.
Now we just have the outline version of the text as its own layer.
What I want to do is isolate the brightest portions of this text.
To do that, I'm going to use a Track Matte.
I'm going to start by duplicating the layer Control or Command D,
and then go to the Track Matte column and change it from none to Luma Matte.
What a Luma Matte is,
is basing the Alpha channel of this layer on
the brightness values or the luminosity on the layer above it.
Wherever the brightest pixels are here,
on this layer is where
the most opaque or least transparent pixels are going to be on this layer right here,
it's using it as a mask based on the brightness values of the pixels.
Now with the transparency grid on,
you can see that these are just semi-transparent,
they're not completely gone,
but that is probably fine.
We're going to do something in the next step that will probably get rid of those pixels.
Let's add a new adjustment layer,
which by the way, the keyboard shortcut is Control Alt Y or Command Option Y on a Mac.
Learn those keyboard shortcuts.
On this adjustment layer we're going to add
a Fast Box Blur so that we can soften this up.
Does not need to be much,
probably just around 1.5 or something,
which by the way, this effect is super sensitive.
If you hold down the "Control" key,
it makes your adjustments much finer,
so you can really dial this in.
Probably right around 1.5, make sure to repeat edge pixels.
Then I'm going to use a levels to crush the Alpha.
This is how we're going to isolate it to the brightest pixels.
Let's go to Alpha on the channel and then bring the brights up and crush the darks,
so we're left with just these brightest lines basically of that outline layer,
so it's something like that.
That looks pretty good. I might even be able to
increase the blur radius a little bit more.
I'm going to go around to maybe 1.8,
1.9 and then see if I can dial this in a little bit more.
These aren't so streaky so that the lines aren't so tall.
I have a bunch of lines now that I can use as
a source for my flares isolated to those brightest portion.
Let's go back to the Chrome Look comp and drag that flare comp right above the extrusion.
It's really hard to see,
but let me switch to full resolution.
If I turn it off and back on even then it's really hard to see.
I'll solo the layer and you could see the line right there.
What I want to do do is change this blend mode to add and then add a Fast Box Blur.
Let's blur that layer out,
and it's very, very subtle,
but that's just because of how tiny of a source we're working with by solo
this you can see that just blurring it out a little basically makes those pixels go away.
We need to crush the Alpha,
same way we have been this whole time.
Let's add a levels and go into the Alpha channel and bring up the brights,
may be crush the darks just a little bit.
But that way we're left with just these little bright spots.
Now that's much more visible.
Now that's probably more extreme than it needed to be,
so I'm going to soften that a little bit,
but I also want to change this from horizontal and vertical to just horizontal,
just like we did with the foreground text flare.
Now, we're just blurring it out horizontally.
We can create these really cool looking flares.
It is pretty subtle still,
so I might need to pump this up.
But as I go a little too extreme,
we really see these jagged edges so we can't push it quite that far.
Instead, I might need to go back into my flare source,
find some of those spots and then maybe dial
this back a little just so there's more information to work with here.
Then I can play around with that a little bit more.
So we'll call that good for now.
Then let's duplicate that layer and change it from horizontal to vertical.
Now we're getting a cross blur,
a starburst that looks pretty cool when you combine it with the horizontal flare.
That's pretty skinny compared the horizontal blur.
I could duplicate the Fast Blur and reset
it and then blur it out just a little bit so it's a little more consistent,
but that's totally up to you if you want to do that to make it a little bit more soft.
I don't really mind it being super sharp,
but maybe I'll just add like a point to blur to it just so
it's a tiny bit softer and then I can adjust the Alpha in the levels as well.
Now that might be a little bit too tall,
so I'm going to back that off just a little bit,
but I do like the shape that it's creating.
If I solo both those layers,
you can see this cross starburst flare, looks pretty cool.
Now I want to duplicate that flare one more time and instead of using the Fast Box Blur,
I want to add in a glint that's going at an angle,
which you can't do with Fast Box Blur;
that's only vertical, horizontal, or both.
I'm going to get rid of those two blurs and then add in a directional blur.
I could bring that in and I'll put it before the levels then I can blur it
out and then I have complete control over the direction of this one.
I'm going to move it to maybe about 12 or 14 degrees,
that works pretty well and just adjust this blur length so that it's tight,
it doesn't have to be super long.
Maybe increase the angle just a little bit and then mess with the Alpha,
so it's not quite so harsh.
I want it to be soft like the others.
Just a push and pull between the Alpha and the actual blur.
If I zoom in nice and close,
you can see what this looks like.
I think I might want to actually combine this with the Fast Box Blur, so let's do that.
Fast Box Blur, put it at the top and just blur this out ever so slightly first
before adding in that directional blur
and that just makes the whole thing a little bit softer.
But now we have this three-part customer lens flare basically,
I'm going to shorten it just a little bit and let's
take a look at it in context. There we go.
We've got this really cool retro looking flare,
which is completely customizable.
If I wanted to make the vertical one a little bit longer, I could do that.
It's completely up to you.
You could even add colors to these.
If I wanted to make that one directional flare, let's say a hot pink,
I could just add a fill effect and change its color to be super saturated, bright pink.
I can zoom in here,
I'll turn that off and back on and you can see how that basically tints the flare.
Maybe I do the same thing to the others,
but I could change the color up instead of the pink color.
Maybe we do a tealish color for the vertical one and for
the horizontal one let's change that to be a little bit more of a purply blue.
Now we're creating this multicolored RGB flare.
It's totally up to you how you want to style these.
Maybe you want it to be more of a gold theme.
You could just change all these to orangey
yellow colors and make it reflect a little bit more gold.
Of course, that would probably make more sense if our text
was reflecting gold or if it was a gold material.
Again, all you'd have to do for that is go into
the Reflection source and change your color scheme.
Maybe we should match the colors of this text a little bit more and
just keep them all nice and bluish colors.
I'll do that for this vertical one.
For the horizontal one,
let's just make it a little bit more visible,
something like that and then for that diagonal blur,
let's instead of going hot pink,
change that to being somewhere in this yellowish,
greenish, blue spectrum as well.
Isolating those three layers,
this is what it looks like.
So that's cool. Let's take a look at this in motion and see how it actually looks.
So there's what it looks like in motion.
Obviously the flare looks cool when it was stationary,
but now that we can see it in motion,
there's just way too much of it and it's
flickering a lot so what can we do to handle that?
Well, we need to basically just tone down how much of this text is getting the flare.
Let's go back into the Flare Comp.
This is why we're seeing so many flares,
is because that highlight across all of
the text is being displayed because the way that we've set this up.
We're going to tone this down by adding a layer,
new solid and click "Okay" and we're going to add an effect called Fractal Noise.
Bring that out and this is just a generated noise pattern that we can customize.
Now, by default, this might work,
so let's just try using it as is.
We're going to use a special blending mode
that's all the way down at the bottom of the list.
I know you can't see it,
but it's at the very bottom.
It's called Stencil Luma.
Go all the way down towards the bottom Stencil Luma.
What this does is uses the brightness values just like the Luma Matte does of
this layer to generate transparency or the Alpha channel for everything below it;
because it's a blending mode,
it affects everything below that layer.
If I zoom in here nice and close and turn that layer off and on,
you can see that it's affecting the way that these pixels are being displayed.
Now it's pretty uniform at this point.
Let me just for a second turn this back to normal and you can see
that we've got a low contrast fractal noise pattern.
I want to go to the contrast value and increase
that so that there are much brighter portions and much darker portions.
Pixels that are 100 percent white and pixels that are 100 percent black.
Because anywhere there's black pixels,
it will be completely transparent,
anywhere that there's white pixels it'll be completely opaque.
I'll switch this back to Stencil Luma,
and now you can see that that's really carving out more of
those pixels and making more of it completely transparent.
Now I just want to adjust the brightness and bring it down even further,
messing with the contrast and that brightness so that we're
isolating a lot more of that outline text.
If I play this back,
you can see there's a lot of flickering
happening and that's probably due to the size of the texture.
If I switch back to normal just so we can
look at this and go into the transform controls.
I can scale this up and I can even turn
down some of the complexity so that it's not so textured,
so that it's a lot smoother and then maybe increase the contrast a little bit more.
Scale it down just a little bit and then set that back to Stencil Luma.
That smooths everything out a little bit more and we should now have
a smaller sample of pixels to be generating the flares off of.
This is before and this is after.
Let's take a look at what that did to our main comp.
Now these flares are a lot less uniform.
There are points where there are a good number of them,
but there are also points where not really any flares is showing up,
so right here at the beginning it's hitting on that point.
But further down there's flares showing up over here, one right there,
so this is really helping us tone down how
much of those flares are actually being created.
Now let's preview that one more time and see how it affected the overall flares.
That looks much better.
It's smoother, it doesn't flicker as much,
and it's much more isolated.
We still get some nice and bright flares showing up,
but it's not nearly as uniform as before.
This is again something that you can completely customize,
you mess with it however much you want.
If you want the flares,
if you don't want them, you can leave them off.
It's totally up to you and if you don't like where they're showing up,
you can always go into the Chrome flare,
into the Fractal Noise,
and go back to those transform controls because you can actually offset the turbulence.
Let me turn this back to normal and if I just offset it,
you can see that that's changing where it is.
If I get it back to Stencil Luma and just shift it over,
then the brightest points at this resting resolve a state will be more over here,
so my flares are going to show up more over the M. This is a way that you
can really fine tune where those flares are going to show up.
But overall, I'm pretty happy with the way that turned out.