Lens Flares

Post-Processing : Lens Flares

Your typical lens-flare

Lens flares are common post-processes that were rendered popular by the infamous "Lens Flare" filter in Photoshop which can be easily recognized in many synthetic images from the early 90s (and still today in images from suspicious websites as it's quite official that this plug-in, although serving its purpose in its time, is now a proof of arguable taste).

Lens flares are created by light entering through a camera objective and reflecting multiple times off the surface of the numerous lenses inside it, creating several recognizable artifacts.

I won't linger on the optical details of what creates which lens-flare artifact, I'm only concentrating on their visual aspect. For that purpose, I relied on a well known After Effects plug-in called "Optical Flares" by Video Copilot (http://www.videocopilot.net/products/opticalflares/).

Before going any further, I advise you to watch the nice tutorial video of this plug-in so you get familiar with its capabilities and vocabulary.

The Lens Flare Class

I attached myself to the annoying task of reverse engineering the OFP / Optical Flares Preset file format.

For details on the file format, check the Video Copilot "Optical Flares" File Format page.

The LensFlare class is written in C# and is available here : http://www.patapom.com/Temp/LensFlare.cs

It reflects all the informations contained in an OFP file and supports the 12 kinds of Lens Objects that exist in Optical Flares, shown in the image below.

The 12 types of "Lens Objects" supported by Video Copilot's Optical Flares

Of course, this class only describes a lens flare, it doesn't display a lens-flare. So that's what we're going to see next.