Several shots required glows – both on a broken amulet and within the smoky air of an alter. Here’s the plate from one such shot:

To separate the amulet and several broken pieces, rotoscoping was applied. Multiple masks were created on multiple layers:

The separated pieces were  color corrected with Hue/Saturation filters and blurred:

The blurred result was combined with the plate via a Color Burn blending mode:

That’s all a glow is – a blurry copy of a bright element. Glow appears in the real world when a  bright light source reflects off participating media. Participating media might be dust, smoke, fog, or similar particles suspended in the air. A similar optical effect – halation – occurs when a bright light source reflects internally off the components of a lens or through the substrates of a piece of film.

This shot also required a foggy atmosphere. To create a rippling fog pattern, a Fractal Noise filter was animated. The Evolution and Offset Turbulence properties caused the noise pattern to undulate and “flow” upwards:

In turn, the noise was used to matte a blue-tinted copy of the plate, which was placed over the comp with low opacity. Here’s the final version:

Check out the matte painting breakdown here.