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Distortionary

Filter 01 · Bloom and glare · 0.1 beta

Bloomifier

Glow that follows the eye, not a blur slider.

Multi-pass bloom, ported from a game engine’s post-processing chain to still images, plus the four kinds of glare the vision literature measures separately: veil, corona, halo and streaks. Bright light spills the way it does on a retina, and it eases into the headroom below white instead of clipping into a flat disc.

Try it on your photo Buy from $19

Beta pricing, locked in once you buy.

  • GIMP 3
  • Photoshop
  • Desktop app
  • Command line · Enterprise
A small-town street at night with streetlamps and car light trails, with bloom, veil, corona and six-blade streaks added.
Before After
Night street. Glow plus scotopic veil, corona, halo and six-blade streaks. 
$ bloomifier street.png -i 1.2 -t 0.6 -s 0.7 -l 7 --veil scotopic --corona --halo --streaks 6

The command that rendered it. Command-line tools come with Enterprise.

Try it live

The real filter, compiled to WebAssembly. Nothing leaves your browser.

Photograph

Your image stays on your machine. The filter runs here, in WebAssembly.

0.55

Brightness where the glow starts.

1.40
0.70

0 is one wide veil; higher stacks tighter halos.

7

Each level doubles the radius.

Physical glare

How it works

6 steps, each doing one thing.

  1. 01

    Threshold

    Only the bright parts of the image are kept. The knee sets how gradually the glow begins.

  2. 02

    Downsample

    The highlights are shrunk step by step, up to nine times, so the glow can reach far without a single hot pixel turning into a blob. 1,2

  3. 03

    Upsample

    The steps are combined on the way back up. Scatter decides how much each one adds, from one wide veil to a stack of tight halos.

  4. 04

    Tone map

    The glow is scaled, eased so it never blows out, and added to the image or written alone on black.

  5. 05

    Physical glare

    Optional. Veiling glare from Spencer et al.’s day, dusk and night point spread functions or the CIE 2002 glare equation; a ciliary corona of fine needles; the lenticular halo; aperture streaks from any number of iris blades. Computed in linear light and sized in degrees of visual angle.

  6. 06

    Soft composite

    Glare is eased into the headroom left above each pixel. A hard clip draws a bright Mach band around the glow and weakens the illusion of brightness (Yoshida et al., 2008).

Specimens

Night street with a moderate glow around the lamps and light trails.
Before After
Glow only. Intensity 1.6, threshold 0.55, scatter 0.8, eight levels.
The glow from the night street alone, on black.
Bloom only, on black, for a Screen or Add layer.
A city at dusk seen from a ridge, with the city lights glowing softly.
Before After
City at dusk. A light hand: intensity 0.7, threshold 0.72.
A close-up of a small flame on dirt, glowing.
Before After
Flame. Glow from the hottest core only.

Parameters

Every control, named.

The same names in every host and in the JSON presets. With an Enterprise license, the command-line tool reads those presets and runs them on a thousand files.

Name Range Effect
intensity ≥ 0 Glow strength before tone mapping.
threshold 0–1 Brightness where the glow starts.
knee 0–1 Soft-knee width. 0 is a hard cutoff.
levels 1–10 Mip levels. Each one doubles the radius.
scatter any How much each level adds on the way up.
extrapolate any Scales the change: 0.5 is half, 2 doubles it, −1 inverts it.
veil day · dusk · night Scattered light from the eye’s point spread function.
streaks 0, 3–n blades Starburst from a polygonal iris; 0 for round.
fov degrees Horizontal field of view. Sizes the eye effects.

Hosts

GIMP 3
A native GIMP 3 plug-in written in C, with the filter linked in statically. GIMP 3.0 or later, Linux and Windows.
Photoshop
A UXP panel running the filter as WebAssembly. Photoshop 2024 (25.0) or later, macOS and Windows.
Desktop app
Distortionary for the desktop: open, adjust with a live preview, export. Linux and Windows; macOS later.
Command line
Enterprise only. The same filter as a command-line tool, for batches, build scripts and render farms. Settings load from JSON presets.

Built on

  • Spencer, Shirley, Zimmerman and Greenberg (1995)

    Physically-based glare effects for digital images. The day, dusk and night PSFs.

  • CIE 135 (2002)

    The CIE general disability glare equation.

  • Yoshida, Ihrke, Mantiuk and Seidel (2008)

    Brightness of the glare illusion. Why the composite is soft.

  • Ritschel, Ihrke, Frisvad et al. (2009)

    Temporal glare. Corona and halo from wave optics.

  • Jimenez (2014)

    Next generation post processing in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. The downsample and upsample filters.

Notes

  1. 1

    Williams (1983). Pyramidal parametrics. SIGGRAPH ’83. The mip levels.

  2. 2

    Burt and Adelson (1983). The Laplacian pyramid as a compact image code. IEEE Transactions on Communications 31(4).

Pricing

Bloomifier alone, or the whole set.

Bloomifier

$19 $29 at 1.0

One filter in GIMP and Photoshop, one user.

  • GIMP 3 plug-in (Linux and Windows)
  • Photoshop panel (2024 or later, macOS and Windows)
  • Updates for the 1.x line
Buy

Complete set

Recommended

$49 $89 at 1.0

All four filters in GIMP and Photoshop, plus the desktop app. One user.

  • Bloomifier, Dithertastical, Grungetyper, Octodoctor
  • Distortionary desktop (Linux, Windows; macOS when ready)
  • Every GIMP plug-in and Photoshop panel
  • New filters added to the set during beta, at no charge
Buy

Studio

$199 $349 at 1.0

The complete set for up to ten seats in one organization.

  • Everything in the complete set
  • Ten named or floating seats
  • Invoice on request
Buy

Enterprise

Call for details

The command-line tools and libraries, for pipelines, servers and products of your own.

  • Everything in the complete set
  • Command-line tools for every filter
  • Rust libraries, C API and WebAssembly builds
  • Batch, server and render-farm use

Priced per organization.

Contact us

Beta prices. A license bought now stays valid through 1.x, and you never pay the difference.

The other filters

Pattern dithering

Dithertastical

Halftones in any shape you like.

Distressed type

Grungetyper

Type that wears like the real thing.

Masks

Octodoctor

Masks from gradients and keys, snapped to edges.