Amberlight 2
Price $59.99 (£42,€ 55) | company Escape Motions | website www.escapemotions.com
Generate complex images
When we reviewed the debut release of Amberlight, one thing we hoped to see in a future update was the ability to produce animated sequences – and now, along with a few other niceties, that’s just what version 2 delivers.
If you’re not familiar with the original, Amberlight draws streams of particles distorted by the ‘magnetic’ influence surrounding specific points, called fields. Up to a dozen of these fields interact to produce wonderfully complex imagery. It features a low-res realtime preview so as you move the fields around and alter their size, force, intensity and cut-off, you can quickly see how the patterns change. But the real beauty is in watching the image resolve, revealing more and more detail and often producing exquisite and unexpected results.
You have plenty of control over the look of the image and are able to change the colour palette – which is applied instantly without needing to re-render – as well as other factors, including contrast, tint and glow. The image can then be saved as a variety of image formats and with transparency, so you can combine it with other elements in an image editor or compositor.
With this new release we were worried that the delicate nature of Amberlight’s imagery might make it poorly suited for animation, but its output is rock solid with surprisingly little noise (and a de-noise filter will happily remove the remainder if need be). There’s a definable rasterlevel playback for quickly previewing your animation, but the high-res (up to 4K) results are simply stunning; if you’re doing motion graphics work, sci-fi scenes or abstract sequences, you’ll easily find a way of integrating Amberlight 2 into your workflow.
This release also features Modifiers, split between Variations and Waves, each of which has a number of options. These are used to control the behaviour of the fields and the way they influence the particles. They’re a small addition to the UI, but have a massive effect on the end result, adding some much needed variety to the appearance of Amberlight’s output.
As with the original, there are still a few features we’d like to see. Animation has a slight ease-in/easeout built in, but there’s no control over individual animation curves. Admittedly it’s not a big deal and you could always retime in post if need be, but rudimentary curves would complete the animation function nicely. The new Modifiers aren’t animatable either, which would surely be a useful addition for a future release.
These nitpicks aside, Amberlight 2 is a brilliant little app, ideal for swirling backdrops, cool reflections, or crazy displacement maps. Not only is it stupidly easy to create spectacular artwork, but it’s also inspirational – if you can’t think what to create then just hit the randomise button and let the results spark your imagination.
The real beauty is in watching the image resolve, revealing more and more detail