Bloom, glowy effects? Attension artists

[Nova]

Hey all the artists on this forum. This game is extraordinarily beautiful. Its able to add such detail and awesomeness while retaining what makes pixel art so great. I wanted to ask how the glowy effects work. Someone described it as bloom? Not really sure what it is. What i tried is that I did a bit of pixel art and then I upscaled it. Then I reduced hardness and opacity then and repeatedly clicked around the place. it ended super atrocious tbh so I really want some help in replicating it. Anyone have an idea?

[YinYin]

It's soft lights on top of traditional colour limited pixel art.

At least that's what it looks like to me.

Experiment with blending and opacity on the lighting layer to retain the sharp pixels below instead of washing them out with the smooth light gradients.

[AndrewFM]

I think what you're looking for is just something like Photoshop's Outer Glow[design.tutsplus.com] layer style.

Unless you're talking about the full-screen, animated, pulsating glow that appears sometimes in the game (such as when you activate one of those big cube-like monoliths that rise out of the ground after each boss). In that case, that's achieved with shaders. In other words, they don't use an art program to make that effect, they do via code by writing small programs that run on the graphics card.

[Nova]

I see thanks guys. Also like, if you look in the backgrounds of things you, like the titan image background on the form. Theres alot of tone in the corners and stuff like that

[Nova]

I dont think its outer glow, isnt that for fonts? I mean like the toning and shading in the various trees, buildings etc that isnt pixel art. They scale the pixel art up and add it. I have no Idea how they apply that shading as well as what they scale it up to

[AndrewFM]

Assuming you're talking about what I think you're talking about, there is no scaling involved. It really is just outer glow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksNLw7MU9_4

[Nova]

Originally posted by AndrewFM:

Assuming you're talking about what I think you're talking about, there is no scaling involved. It really is just outer glow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksNLw7MU9_4

I see what about the tone in the corners and in various places? Outer glow? I thought it looked so smooth and subtle tone that it couldnt be pixel art? How would I apply that?

[Nova]

In the same image in the corners theres this really subtle tone from purple to majenta, you cannot even see the change in pixels. How is that achieved also

[YinYin]

These layer styles aren't what you are looking for.
The important thing is the blending and transparency they use, which you can manually apply to a layer as well (and then use a soft brush/gradient tools to draw any kind of lighting on it).

[AndrewFM]

Oh, okay. Easiest way I can think of to replicate that type of stuff is just soft-brushes+gaussian blur, then just tweaking around the colors, opacity, and layer blend modes. Maybe use some gradients too. I know it's a kind of vague answer, but it's such a broad technique that is used in so many different ways in the game, that's probably the most specific I can get. You just gotta use your artistic discretion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b57Y21SrFec

[Nova]

Do I need to do any upscaling, also what is a good canvas size for making backgrounds

[AndrewFM]

Nah, don't upscale it. It looks upscaled in the video, but that's only because in Photoshop I'm zoomed in. As for some pixel art background sizes... Hyper Light Drifter uses a 480x270 display. SNES uses 256x224, Genesis 320x224, Gameboy 160x144, Gameboy Advanced 240x160.

[Nova]

ah ok I thats basically it, Thanks