We recently started working on improving the glare node for a better user experience and improved flexibility, as per the Future of Glare node task. You can check what changed in the release notes. But I shall provide a summary in this post.
If you have any feedback on the changes, please let us know.
Options Are Now Inputs
All node options are now single value inputs that you can link to and use inside node groups. They are “single value”, so they can’t vary per pixel.
Node Panels
Inputs are now organized into three panels, grouped by their function. One panel is for highlights extraction, one panel is for adjusting the generated glare, and one panel is for generating the glare itself.
Glare And Highlights Outputs
Two new outputs were added, Glare and Highlights. The Glare output gives the generated glare without the input, and is useful when the user wants to adjust the glare before adding it to the image. The Highlights output gives the areas that are considered highlights when computing the glare, and is useful if the user wants to temporally check the highlights while doing adjustments or wants to use those as a base for creating a custom glare setup.
Strength Input
A new Strength input replaces the Mix option. It has a soft range of [0, 1] and can be boosted beyond 1 for stronger glare.
Saturation And Tint
A new Saturation and Tint inputs were added to allow tinting the generated glare.
Size
The Size input for Fog Glow and Bloom is now in the linear [0, 1] range and is relative to the image size. So 1 means it covers the entire image, 0.5 means it covers half the image, 0.25 means it covers quarter the image and so on.
Additionally, for Fog Glow, the range is now continuous and can take any value, not just the 9 discrete values that were previously possible. Bloom still has this limitation though and are still looking into improving it.
Smoothness
A new Smoothness input controls the smoothness of the highlights. This is similar to the Knee parameter in old EEVEE bloom.
Maximum
A new Maximum input suppresses very high highlights, such that the highlight has brightness that are not larger than the input. It is disabled when zero. It is similar to the Clamp option in old EEVEE bloom, but is also smoothed by the Smoothness input.
Bloom Energy Conservation
The bloom output now conserves energy better and has a more reasonable range, but can still be boosted using the Strength input.
Compatibility
Th options that were turned into inputs are now deprecated and will be removed in a future version. We versioned most of those changes, but the versioning could not be 1:1, so expect some differences in the Size and Strength inputs for the Bloom and Fog Glow in some files.