Overview
Deep Glow is a small plug-in that fixes something After Effects has been bad at for twenty years. The built in glow blurs bright pixels and adds them back, which looks like a blur because it is one. Deep Glow builds its falloff the way light actually falls off, which means the core stays tight, the spread carries a long way at very low intensity, and highlights bloom instead of smearing. Once you have used it, the built in effect becomes hard to look at.
This is the licensed build, so the watermark and the trial nag are both gone and renders come out clean at any resolution. It installs as a plug-in inside an existing After Effects installation and appears under the effect menu on first launch. Presets from the standard library are included and land in the effects and presets panel with the plug-in.
Why the falloff matters
A glow made from a gaussian blur has a soft core and a hard cut, so you either get a weak bloom or a milky wash across the whole frame with nothing in between. Deep Glow composites several falloff stages together, which gives a bright tight centre and a very faint spread that reaches most of the way across the comp. That is what real lens bloom does, and it is why footage with this on it stops looking like a motion graphic.
The compositing happens in 32-bit float where the project is set to it, so highlights above white are treated as brighter rather than clipped down to one. On a comp graded in a linear working space this is the difference between a practical light in frame reading as hot and reading as flat.
Controls that get used
Radius and exposure do most of the work. Threshold decides how bright a pixel has to be before it contributes, and on graded footage it is usually the first thing to pull down rather than up. Chromatic aberration adds a subtle colour split at the edges of the spread, which sells the lens more than any other single control in the panel.
The tint and colour remap section lets the glow shift hue across its own falloff, so a highlight can go warm at the core and cool at the edges without a second effect. Composite mode chooses between adding over the original layer and replacing it, and the matte options let a glow be constrained by another layer so only part of a frame blooms.
Performance and render behaviour
It is GPU accelerated and will use CUDA, Metal equivalents or OpenCL depending on the machine, falling back to CPU when no supported card is present. On a modern card a full frame glow at 4K adds a few milliseconds per frame, which is nothing compared to the built in effect at a similar radius.
Multi frame rendering is supported, so it does not become the bottleneck that forces the whole comp back onto a single thread. Deep Glow also renders identically in the render queue and through Media Encoder, which sounds obvious until you have been caught out by a plug-in that does not.
What you get
- Physically shaped falloff with a tight core and long faint spread
- 32-bit float compositing with values above white preserved
- Threshold, exposure and radius controls that behave predictably
- Chromatic aberration across the glow spread
- Colour remapping across the falloff for warm core and cool edge looks
- Matte input so a glow can be constrained by another layer
- GPU acceleration with a CPU fallback
- Multi frame rendering support
- Preset library installed into the effects and presets panel
Inside the archive
- Deep Glow 2 plug-in installer for After Effects
- Preset library for the effects and presets panel
- Licence applied during install
- Readme with the supported host versions
System requirements
| Operating system | Windows 10 version 22H2 or Windows 11, 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Host application | After Effects 2022 or newer |
| Processor | Any current x64 processor |
| Memory | 8 GB, matching the host requirement |
| Graphics | GPU with 4 GB VRAM recommended, CPU fallback available |
| Storage | 200 MB |
Installing it
- Close After Effects completely.
- Run the installer as administrator and let it detect the host version.
- Confirm the plug-in folder it offers if you have more than one After Effects build installed.
- Finish setup. The licence is applied at the end of the install.
- Launch After Effects and find the effect under the stylise group.
Mirrors
| Route | Region | Note | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct, primary | Europe | No wait, resumable | Online |
| Direct, secondary | North America | No wait, resumable | Online |
| Torrent magnet | Global | Not needed at this size | Online |
Release history
- Fixed banding on very wide radius glows over flat gradients
- Matte input now respects layer transforms correctly
- Support added for the current After Effects build
- Colour remap section added across the falloff
- Multi frame rendering support enabled
- Reduced GPU memory use at 4K and above
Questions about this release
Does it watermark the render?
No. The licence is applied during install, so renders come out clean at every resolution.
Which After Effects versions does it attach to?
Anything from the 2022 cycle onward. Older hosts will install but the GPU path is disabled.
Do the presets come with it?
Yes, they install into the effects and presets panel and are available as soon as the host restarts.
Does it render the same through Media Encoder?
Yes. The output is identical whether the comp goes through the render queue or the encoder.
Comments
Installed onto three After Effects versions on the same machine, picked the folder each time, all fine.
The chromatic aberration slider is doing more work than any plug-in I paid for.
Comments are read before they appear. If a build stops working, say so here and it gets rebuilt rather than quietly left up.
Renders clean, no watermark. Threshold plus a low exposure gets a look the built in glow never reaches.