Outer glow

I can't seem to be able to Goolge the right question to find my answer as Fusion is very new to me, but all I'd like to do is add an outer glow to this eyeball so it stands out better from the background layer beneath.

Maybe someone will post an easier way to do it, but I think this will do the job you're looking for:

OuterGlow.jpg (103.37 KiB) Viewed 674 times

Here's what I did:

MediaIn1 is just some random footage I grabbed for the test.

Ellipse1 is a circle that is applied to the Effect Mask input of the test footage to give me an object with a transparent background similar to the image you posted. You can see the result in the left viewer pane. I'm going to refer to the visible part of this as the "object".

Background1 is set to a yellow colour - on its own it fills the frame with that color but I fed its Effect Mask input with the object footage - that uses the transparency of the object to limit the colour to just the area covered by the object itself. The result is a solid yellow circle that's exactly the same size and shape as the object. This is later merged behind the object, and if that was all there was to it then it would be completely hidden behind the object, except that:

Transform1 takes the yellow background circle and allows you to enlarge it so that it will "peek out" from around the edges of the object, and it also allows you to move the circle up/down + left/right in case you want the "glow" to be offset from the centre a bit.

Blur1 blurs the edges of the background circle, which sells the "glow" part of the effect

And finally Merge1 puts the blurred circle behind the object, showing the result visible in the right viewer pane.

Thanks kindly for that detailed response Sean! I'm going to give that a go on Monday once I'm back at my desk.

Hey Sean,

Everything you wrote seemed to make sense, but I'm so new to fusion, I think I might need an additional hand. I'm not 100% sure I'm connecting the times correctly as my arrows are different from yours. Perhaps there's an order to it, or joining each if different than I have done. Would you either be able to add more steps in between what you've written down, or better yet, screengrab a movie of how you did it? Thanks kindly for your efforts either way!

OK, I think everything is good now with the connecting of the items, but my problem is I can't adjust the size of the backdrop circle, (white in my case, yellow in yours). When I change size, the green box gets bigger but it seems like it's adjusting the size of another layer. Please see those two screengrabs, and if it helps, the final is showing the sort of video I want the video of the eye highlighted against.

@CrackerJackFlash, you may need to post the revised node diagram for us to see what is the remaining issue.

First though, go back to @Sean's example, and notice which lines are connected to blue inputs (that's for masking), and which are connected to yellow inputs (that's feeding the image), and then at the Merge node notice which input goes to yellow (for background image) and which to green (for foreground - top - image).

If you match up those lines, then when you select the transform node and scale up, you should see the blurred border peek out as he described.

When you have that working, THEN merge in another image - the colorful blue one that you showed above. The blue image should go into the new Merge2 node's *background* (yellow) while the eyeball/glow node tree goes into the Merge2 node's *foreground* (green).

Thank you @bounceHouse (ccing @Sean Nelson).

That's the problem I'm having..I just don't know where exactly to connect to each node. Anyhow, even though my arrows are different colours from Sean's example, it seems all should be working, I just can't adjust the circle size as per my last response and screengrabs.

As @bouncerhouse spotted, the problem is that you've connected the "pipes" to the wrong inputs on the nodes. For example, you've connected the Background1 node's output to the Transform1 node's blue effects mask input, but it needs to be connected to the yellow image input instead.

Drag the arrow end of the misconnected inputs away from the nodes they go into and release the mouse button to get rid of them. Then reconnect them to the correctly coloured inputs using the image I posted above as a guide.

Once you've done that you should be able to resize the background "glow" by adjusting the size parameter in the Inspector Panel for the Transform node.

@CrackerJackFlash, after you recheck the colors, feel free to post another screenshot of your revised node tree if things still aren't working.

Thanks to @sean Nelson and @bounceHouses help on this, I've finally got a glowing eyeball...thank you so much for the learnings!