Deep Glow Review: Physically Accurate Glows Inside After Effects

Deep Glow is the latest plugin from Plugin Everything, bringing realistic glows inside After Effects. Glows have always been a popular tool, hence why there are so many offerings like Universe’s glow suite, tons of stacked glow presets, Sapphire’s glows, and others. In this review, we’ll go over how well Deep Glow works, how it stacks up to other glow plugins, and why you should grab it. Disclaimer: Plugin Everything is sponsoring this review, but all opinions below are my own and they have no say as to what comments I make.

We’re also giving away 10 free copies of Deep Glow to random people who subscribe to our channel and leave a comment on the review video.

Winners:

• Skye X
• Agent Zero Music
• plus
• Neologic Studios
• Asuka Kyu
• Jafet Noriega
• Chris Talbot
• Baisil Kunjumon
• Sunny Apples
• Horiza

Physically Accurate Glows

The basic run down is that Deep Glow is a GPU accelerated plugin, compatible in 32bpc, and has a physically accurate inverse square falloff algorithm to achieve realistic and naturally looking glows.

The great part about the plugin is that it gives you controls you’ll actually use. So many glow plugins come with so many controls that are unoptimized, require so much tinkering to balance things out, and most of them are never touched. In Deep Glow, there are downsampling quality controls, aspect ratio, chromatic aberration, and spread/smoothness control. For once, I felt like I could nail down a look very fast without having to constantly tinker properties that are always clashing. Things just work.

Choosing the Best Glow

As you can see, the linear falloff in the default After Effects “Glow” effect is pretty atrocious. Universe Glow is a nicer glow in terms of color, but the falloff isn’t any better. Deep Glow has the best falloff and looks the most natural. It also required a lot less tweaking to get acceptable results.

Glow Everything

At the end of the day, it boils down to how often you “glow” things. I personally use glows all the time in almost every project in some shape or form. I like Deep Glow because it simply works and gives me nice results quickly. If you don’t use glows often, a preset of stacked native glows to emulate realistic falloffs might be sufficient.

Overall, I’d like to suggest Deep Glow in most people’s arsenal. Glows are much more pleasant with it, and there isn’t anything similar to it in the same price range unless you want to dish out money for Sapphire stuff (no).