Tiffen 77GG1 77mm Glimmer Glass 1 Filter

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The foggy effect these filters give at night isn’t overly easy to replicate in post – at least for me – but in many situations the K&F 1/2 also yielded unexpected and/or undesirable (side) effects. The number of pictures where I thought it actually added something to them was rather small and life is definitely too short to always take a picture with and without filter to blend them together in post afterwards.

More Samples Sony A7III | 28mm | Tiffen Glimmerglass1 Sony A7III | 28mm | Tiffen Glimmerglass1 Sony A7III | 28mm | Tiffen Glimmerglass1 Sony A7III | Laowa 35mm 0.95 | f/0.95 | K&F Diffusion 1/2 Sony A7III | Laowa 35mm 0.95 | f/0.95 | K&F Diffusion 1/2 Sony A7III | Laowa 35mm 0.95 | f/0.95 | K&F Diffusion 1/2 Sony A7III | Laowa 35mm 0.95 | f/2.8 | K&F Diffusion 1/2 Sony A7III | Laowa 35mm 0.95 | f/0.95 | K&F Diffusion 1/2 Further Reading These filters are made by several manufacturers these days and they come in different strengths. Filters with the same nominal strength from different manufacturers do not necessarily offer the same degree of the effect though, which makes it especially hard to find the best one for your needs.It’s a diffusion filter, it goes on the front of the lens. You put it on your super-sharp, modern lens and you make pictures.

For astrophotography the better way to highlight brighter stars in images may be the use of some of the quite good Samyang lenses which are known to show slightly undercorrected spherical aberration leading to a similar effect while maintaining comparably high contrast and resolution in the whole frame. I have never been a huge fan of these so called “effect filters” but my friend Simeon Kolev showed a few cool pictures where he used these Diffusion filters to good effect, so I decided to give it a try. It’s fine, it’s an interesting look, it just starts to sort of blend after a while. Filmmakers, just like still photographers, tend to be fad followers. If you hold it and shift it around so the light reflects off the glass, the surface of a Glimmerglass filter looks like it has been sprinkled with some sort of metallic dust, maybe gold. The particles aren’t really on the surface, they are sandwiched between two thin layers of glass, and they probably aren’t gold, though for the price of the filter I’m thinking maybe they should be.That small dot between the bloom of the Moon and the flare spot is not another flare spot. It is Mars, a little over-exposed into white but hints of red remain at its edges. As this time Mars rises with the night and Jupiter and Saturn pair up higher in the sky—you can see several of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings with ordinary binoculars—the Moon racing by them and then leaving them as the month goes on.

The Moon in this image dominates the composition and the difference between the Glimmerglass-filtered image and the straight image couldn’t be starker. They are different photographs. The dark foreground areas of the photograph look identical in each and yet in one the diffuse glow around the Moon renders a different Moon entirely. Again, one is not better than the other—that depends on the photographer’s intent and the viewer’s taste—but the different possibilities are clearly, and literally, illuminated. And sharp they are. Lenses are judged now by enlarging an image on a screen to 100%—image pixel per screen pixel—at a size and a viewing distance few images are ever seen at—and the best lenses pass the test, exhibiting a crystal clear resolution that can bring childish mirth to your face. It’s fun, in a way, to see that little detail in the photo now clearly visible after tapping the zoom-in button. It makes you want to zoom in on every image, test every lens to see how sharp it is under maximum magnification. Moment Cinebloom 10% is the most extreme filter, it gives the most bloom and the removes the most contrast from hightlights and shadows. Could the lower contrast be useful if you are shooting in high dynamic range situations, I think so. NiSi recently released a so called “Star Soft” filter which I might give a try in the future — maybe later this fall with less hot nights with less atmospheric turbulences impacting the image quality. In that case the brighter stars should seem more pronounced (as seen with the naked eye), but smaller stars may no longer be visible probably leading to an image with less details. To maintain a high resolution and contrast in the foreground this filter is split in two areas. So one can chose where this effect should be applied. I’m curious how the results will turn out.

I think it’s a bit of the same situation here. Sure, one can get very respectable to good results from really bad lenses if talented — I’m looking at you, Bastian! Cinebloom was made to be cheaper but all of the filters seem to sold out from time to time, and I think it’s pushing up prices. None of them are cheap 🙂 Note in the Glimmerglass photo the ball of greenish light—lens flare from the surface of the filter. The flare is not evenly toned—more on that later. thanks for this nice short review. I don’t like the idea of worsening the optical qualities of a good lens either. But indeed, the achievable looks may be quite nice. I think I’ll give some NiSi filters a try as well. For the displayed use cases (e.g. in the city) those filters reviewed here may be the smarter choice than a undercorrected lens or software based solutions as the results seem to be nicer.

ColorCore® Technology (per < link > The Tiffen ColorCore technology is a secret proprietary formula...) In each of the image pairs that follow the Glimmerglass image is first, followed by the unfiltered image. Looking closely at it the filter looks like a lens’ front element that hasn’t been cleaned in a very long time. These filters are supposed to add a bit of glow to bright parts of the picture, similar to lenses with undercorrected spherical aberration. Many of the older fast Leica lenses are famous for this effect. Sometimes the result is similar to what the Orton effect is achieving, the major difference is, that the Orton effect affects bright and dark parts of the frame alike, whereas the diffusion filters emphasize the brighter parts.All of these filters seem to contain a higher density of very small implanted particles/defects. Those lead to a mixture of diffractive and scattering effects in the path of the light travelling through the optical system. Without going too much into detail most of those effects will lead to blurred light sources where the blurring might be well approximated by the superposition of some gaussian blurs with a filter specific distribution of different radii (it‘s not exactly gaussian, but close enough to keep that simple model — which is also implemented in most photographic/image manipulating software). Hence, yes, theoretically one should be able to recreate these effects quite easily with some work.