Chasing the Glow – Understanding Halation and Why Filmmakers Keep Coming Back to It

MZed Education

by Mascha DeikovaSeptember 4^th, 2026

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There’s a very specific kind of red-orange glow you’ve probably seen a hundred times. A photographic effect where bright light bleeds past its edges – off a neon sign, or a street lamp, or around high-contrast objects – and looks like it’s about to burn a hole through the frame. That glow has a name. Halation. It’s one of those phenomena that film manufacturers spent decades engineering out of existence. Yet somewhere along the way, filmmakers decided they wanted it back. So, what is halation, exactly, and why do some of today’s cinematographers keep reaching for it on purpose? Let’s find out!

Some years ago, my team and I shot a short film for a local competition: from idea to final export in 36 hours. I remember talking to the DP about the possibilities of quickly giving the footage a nostalgic look. He said: “Let’s also add some halation.” That was the first time I saw someone emulating this effect on purpose. Yet the more time I spent with this topic, the more curious contemporary film examples I found. And now, I’d like to share them with you.

What Is Halation? A brief history

Halation is a visual effect that occurs when shooting on film. The most pronounced form is the reddish-orange halo, which appears along high-contrast boundaries when bright areas of an image – especially light sources – softly bleed into the surrounding darkness. This creates a glow most of us are so familiar with.

It occurs because light traveling through the film’s photosensitive emulsion doesn’t necessarily stop there. Some of it can reflect off the back of the film and pass through the emulsion again, exposing it a second time from behind. That bounce-back is what creates the halo. For most of the twentieth century, halation was treated as a flaw to fix, not a look to chase. Kodak even patented an anti-halation backing in the 1930s, designed to absorb stray light before it could reflect back through the emulsion.

However, decades later, filmmakers and photographers began deliberately reintroducing the effect.

But why, you may ask? I like the idea from Tal Lazar’s course “The Art & Science of Lenses” on MZed. There, he talks about lens aberrations like astigmatism. Halation is obviously not one of them, yet the core thought fits perfectly with it as well, in my opinion:

The truth is, every lens has aberrations, and these are what give it its personality. Imagine you could neutralize all the taste in a glass of wine — the result would taste like water. We want things to be different and have character, and that’s what aberrations give us. […] We’re not looking for the technically perfect lens. We are looking for lenses that can tell stories.

Tal’s quote from the course

Switch here the word “lenses” for “film stock,” and that’ll more or less answer the question of why filmmakers strive to bring halation back.

Comeback and a whole aesthetic

A famous example of that comeback in still photography is CineStill 800T, a film launched in 2012 by brothers Brandon and Brian Wright. The photo above was also captured on CineStill 800T.

Their idea was simple: take actual Kodak Vision3 500T–based motion picture film and make it usable for still photographers. The catch was that movie film needs a special lab process most photo labs can’t run — so the Wrights found a way to strip off the layer that made that process necessary. That layer happened to be the same one that keeps halation in check. (If you’re interested in more technicalities, here you are.)

Without that layer (known as “remjet backing”), halation became a signature effect in CineStill images that many photographers love. The first thought that comes to mind when I look at images like the one above is “Wow, how cinematic! Dreamy! Even romantic!” What about you?

The feeling halation sells you

Technically speaking, real halation only happens on film stock. Yet even contemporary filmmakers working entirely digitally often seek a similar effect. One way to approximate it is with a diffusion filter such as Tiffen Black Pro-Mist, which blooms bright highlights and reduces contrast around them. As one industry write-up on creating vintage looks puts it, the filter “introduces a beautiful halation to the images,” along with softer, creamier shadows. This is also the approach we used for the short film Fuel, mentioned above.

So why has this particular kind of glow become so desirable? Partly because of its association with the past. Halation is inseparable from analog photography, and analog photography is inseparable, for lots of us, from nostalgia. Home movies, old photographs, a pre-digital idea of what “real” memory looks like. Our brains are wired to read glowing highlights as warm and human – something a crisp, clinical, digital light rarely can achieve.

At the same time, halation mimics the behavior of human vision. Have you ever noticed how a streetlight can look slightly fuzzy, or how staring at a candle flame can leave a soft afterglow in your vision? Halation feels similar, only a bit exaggerated.

Nightmares, filtered through a 19th-century lens

Like every tool in filmmaking, halation can also become a part of your visual language that tells a story. A good example is Robert Eggers’ 2024 “Nosferatu.” Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke built halation into some of the scenes on purpose, through his choice of lens. For dreamlike sequences with Count Orlok, he reached for a custom-built Dagor, a lens design dating back to the 19th century, also because of what it does to bright light. “Any highlights, they glow and halate,” Jarin Blaschke explained to IndieWire. “So if it’s a nightmare dream sequence, I would put the Dagor on.”

“Dreamlike” is a keyword here, and halation helps create that visual aesthetic. It blurs the boundary between reality and Ellen’s nightmares, making us question what is actually happening and what exists only in her imagination.

Halation, built-in afterwards

Another interesting contemporary cinema example is Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” from 2022. Yes, the one that inspired plenty of jokes about being too dark to see. What makes it especially interesting in this context? Because it used a different route to achieve the same effect. Namely, the halation was built into it afterwards. Cinematographer Greig Fraser and colorist Dave Cole ran a skip-bleach pass during the lab finishing process.

We utilized the skip-bleach process for the halation that it gave us around highlights, rather than for what you typically would use skip-bleach for: increasing contrast and desaturating the image.

A quote by Dave Cole from an interview with American Cinematographer

In a film full of darkness, rain, and neon signs, that built-in halation makes every hard light source feel almost dangerous, as if even Gotham’s brightest points are bleeding into the air around them. That’s a different emotional effect than Nosferatu’s dreaminess. Here, halation can read as menace rather than nostalgia, which points to something important about the effect itself: it has no fixed meaning. Its impact depends on the visual subtext and can be shaped to suit your particular scene.

Conclusion

There’s something about that soft red bleed around a practical light that gets me every time. For some reason, my eyes and my brain perceive it as “beautiful,” “impressive,” “aesthetically pleasing.”

As the examples above show, halation is not only about appearance. It is also about the feeling you want to create: nostalgia, warm memories, softness and dreaminess, disorientation, or even danger. That versatility is what makes it a useful visual tool alongside the other techniques discussed in this article series.

What about you? How do you feel about halation in photos and films? Would you reach for it deliberately in your own work — and if so, would you go the film stock route, the optical filtration, or fake it in post? Let us know in the comments below!

Feature image: a film still from “The Batman” by Matt Reeves, 2022.

Full disclosure: MZed is owned by CineD.