#Muzzle flash png transparent software

Once you’re done, your shot should look something like this: We can simulate this by applying some masks and cutting out only the areas that would directly be hit by the light. It’s not bad, but I personally find that using a simple overlay layer to simulate the muzzle flash light sits very unnaturally on top of our footage rather than in the scene. We can make this look a lot more natural with a technique I described in my After Effects – Natural Lighting VFX Using Mattes tutorial: by creating a matte layer.

#Muzzle flash png transparent software

You can create matte layers in most compositing software packages, but I will talk here in terms of After Effects to keep things simple.ĭuplicate the base footage layer and drag it above the light layer. Add a saturation effect and bring the saturation down to 0 so you end up with black and white footage. Then, add a brightness/contrast adjustment and increase the contrast. The idea is that the bright areas of this matte layer will essentially define the opacity of our light layer. Where the matte is brighter, the light layer will be more opaque, where the matte is darker, the light layer is more transparent.įinally, add a blur effect to soften the matte a little bit. Now go to the ‘track matte’ option for your light layer and set it to ‘luma’.

This tells After Effects that the opacity for this layer is defined by the brightness of the layer directly above, which is our matte layer. And voila, the light from the muzzle flash sits a lot more natural in the scene. I know, I know, it’s not ‘realistic’, but the whole point of the matte is simply to glue the light and the footage together and make the light be dependent on what’s in the scene.