Specular Bloom

Lens flares are one of LightWave's great tools. Actually the "flares" are just the colored disk effect. The glow around the light itself is usually known as "bloom." Obviously this effect is a great feature of LightWave.

In real life, there are occasions where reflections are so bright, they behave just like a light source. A chrome car bumper at noon on a sunny day can have an enormously strong, glaring reflection. A photograph of that bumper would show that glare.

Gaffer includes the ability to add a glow like this to your images. By activating the Bloom feature, strong specular highlights can actually form the bright glowing halo around them in the image. This is not a surface effect, but an image-based one; the glow may go past the boundaries of the surface.

This ability is especially useful for metals in daylight, which is the most common situation where extremely bright reflections are common.