Both utilize the GPU, and I didn’t notice that one was faster than the other. Which One to Buyīoth glow plugins give you fantastic results and render in about the same amount of time. You won’t get the option to fine tune the “Quality”, but there are 4 quality presets (Draft, Production, Best, Extreme) which are probably better for the average user. You can also define a inner and outer tint color if you want to custom colorize the glow. The threshold tends to give me more predictable results without oversaturating the image, and you also get a “Vibrance” feature that allows you to boost the colors if you want to. Optical Glow has many of the same basic features as Deep Glow like glow amount, radius, threshold, etc.

If you want to custom colorize your glow, you can only tint the glow one color, which isn’t a huge drawback for me, but is less than what you get with Optical Glow. You also get blending mode options and more fine controls over the “quality”. The main difference between the two is that you get chromatic aberration, which really adds an extra level of detail to the glow. You have the basic settings that control amount and radius of the flow, colors, etc. Great glow plugin that cost half the price of Optical Glow. Both Deep Glow and Optical Glow uses inverse squared falloff to achieve realistic and natural results. The falloffs tend to look linear, fuzzy, and may contain weird black halos with weird transfer mode blending. The reason the default After Effects glow and many other glows look awful is because the glow falloff doesn’t fade out at a realistic rate.

After effects optical glow