Give calm footage a soft glow with the Dreamy filter

Some footage is sharp in a way that feels harsh. A close-up of a face, a slow walk through a garden or a shot of candles can all look better with a little glow. The Dreamy filter adds it. It places a softened copy of the picture over the original, so light spreads gently around bright areas while the footage underneath stays recognizable.

What Dreamy does

Dreamy lives in the Effects tab of the left panel, under Filters. The tile shows the frame under your playhead.

The effect blends a blurred copy of the frame over the sharp one so that the brighter of the two wins at each point. The result is a bloom around highlights and a softer feel overall in the exported video. The editor preview shows only a slight brightness and color lift, not the bloom, so export a short test to judge it. The shadows lift a touch and the colors get a small boost.

Dreamy has one control, Amount. The default is 50. A low value gives a faint haze, and a high value gives a stronger bloom with softer edges.

The Blur filter in the same group softens the whole picture evenly. Dreamy keeps the detail and adds light on top of it.

Place it over a scene

1. Park the playhead inside the first clip of the scene you want to soften.
2. Open Effects in the left panel and select Filters.
3. Drag Dreamy onto that clip. A teal bar named Dreamy appears in the rows above the clips, covers the clip and is selected.
4. Drag the bar's right handle to the right, across the next clips, until the bar covers the whole scene. The edge snaps to the cuts as it passes them.
5. With the bar selected, drag Amount in the right panel.
6. Export a short test of the scene to check the glow, since the editor preview does not draw it.

One bar and one Amount keep every clip in the scene soft in the same way. If one part of the scene needs a different strength, select the bar, hold the pointer over the timeline at the point where the change should happen, or park the playhead there, and press S. The bar splits in two, both halves keep the effect, and each half gets its own Amount.

Choose footage that suits it

Dreamy suits footage that is already gentle:

• Slow shots of nature, water and sky.
• Close-ups of people in soft light.
• Candle light, string lights and sunsets, where there are bright sources to bloom.
• Memory, dream and flashback scenes.

It suits fast action and screen recordings less, since the glow softens the fine detail the viewer needs to follow.

Keep text readable

A new effect opens in the top row of the element rows, and an effect softens everything on the rows below it. A title you add afterward lands below the Dreamy row and takes on the glow. Drag the title's bar upward until it sits above the effect row, and the text draws crisply on top of the soft picture.

Captions from the Subtitles tab always sit above every effect, so they stay sharp with no extra steps.

Dial in the Amount

Start lower than feels right and raise it slowly. Bright areas are where the bloom shows most, so check the setting on the brightest shot in the scene. If the picture starts to lose its edges, you have gone past what the footage can carry.

To compare with and without the glow, export a short test with the bar on, then again with the bar switched off by the small eye button.

Soften one scene

Choose a calm scene in DepCut, drop Dreamy on its first clip, and stretch the bar across the rest.