LuttieBloom. Soften your highlights.
Digital highlights clip hard. Film highlights bloom — they diffuse into surrounding pixels before clipping. Add that softness to any image or video frame directly in your browser.
Two controls. Precise highlight management.
Amount
How intense the bloom glow is. Low values (5–20) add a subtle, believable highlight softness. Higher values (40+) create a deliberate, dreamlike quality — useful for music videos, fashion, or any look that calls for luminous highlights.
Threshold
Which brightness level triggers bloom. Default is 75 — only the top 25% of tones bloom. Lower it to extend bloom into upper midtones for a more enveloping effect. Raise it to restrict bloom to only the very brightest specular highlights and light sources.
What bloom fixes in digital footage
Harsh highlight clipping
Digital sensors clip highlights abruptly. Bloom diffuses bright edges before they clip, matching how film stock and older lenses render extreme exposure.
Hard specular reflections
Jewellery, wet surfaces, windows — digital specular highlights look sharp and harsh. Bloom softens them into the kind of glow that reads as cinematic.
Artificial-looking skin
Bright skin — foreheads, cheekbones, shoulders — can look waxy on digital. Low bloom at a high threshold subtly softens these areas without affecting midtones.
Street and practical lights
Practicals, neon signs, and street lamps in digital footage look flat and contained. Bloom lets them breathe into the frame the way they do on film.
Overlit indoor scenes
Strong overhead lighting creates unflattering highlights on faces and surfaces. Bloom distributes that energy more naturally.
Drone and outdoor highlights
Sunny outdoor shots — blue sky highlights, sun glinting off water — gain a natural atmospheric softness with low bloom values.
Frequently asked
What is bloom in cinematography?
Bloom is a lens and film phenomenon where bright light sources — highlights, practical lights, specular reflections — diffuse into surrounding pixels, creating a soft glow effect. It's caused by light scattering inside the lens elements and through the film emulsion. Old anamorphic lenses, diffusion filters (like Black Pro-Mist), and slower film stocks all exhibit distinctive bloom characteristics.
What does the Threshold control do?
Threshold sets the brightness level above which bloom activates. At 75 (the default), only the brightest 25% of the image glows. Lower the threshold to make bloom affect more of the image — including upper midtones. Raise it to restrict bloom to only the very brightest highlights like specular reflections and light sources.
How is bloom different from halation?
Bloom is a lens diffusion effect — it creates a bright, relatively neutral glow from highlights. Halation is a film stock effect — it creates a warm, coloured (usually red-orange) glow caused by light reflecting inside the film base. In practice: bloom softens bright areas, halation colours them warmly. Both are convincing on their own; combined they create a comprehensive film simulation.
Does bloom export in the .cube LUT?
No — like all spatial effects, bloom can't be encoded into a per-pixel colour transform. The .cube LUT captures your colour grade. Apply bloom as a separate effect layer in your NLE on top of the LUT.
What amount of bloom looks natural?
10–25% bloom at a high threshold (70–85) gives a subtle, believable result on most footage. Below that range it's almost invisible; above 40% it reads as a stylised effect. The sweet spot for 'this looks like it was shot on film' is usually lower than you'd expect — bloom is most convincing when viewers can't immediately identify it.
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