How to do it...

Let's start tackling this recipe as we always do jump straight into the camera we have placed in the level, the already familiar Camera01, and look through its lens. We should be seeing something such as this:

It's the scene we are already familiar with, but seen from a different angle! The light that you see on the ceiling will help us introduce the effects this recipe is going to be covering, so focus your attention on that actor after we tweak the different settings for the bloom and the lens flares. With that said, let's start tweaking our scene: 

1. Select the PostProcessVolume actor and look inside the Details panel. The Lens section contains the two effects that we are going to be looking at, separated into their own groups, Bloom and Lens Flares. We'll start looking at the first of those categories:

1. Tick the checkboxes for Method and Intensity. We are going to be playing with those two values first. Set the Method to Standard and bump up the Intensity up to 2.5 with those values we should start to see some differences in the rendered image:

Now expand the Advanced section, which is directly underneath the settings we've tweaked in the previous step. In here you will be able to tweak two different type of parameters for the Bloom—the tint and the size of the visible effect.

1. Let's start by adjusting the size, but instead of tweaking each different numbered entry individually we'll focus on the Size scale parameter. This is a scale setting for all bloom sizes, so it controls all of them by just applying a multiplying factor. Let's set it to 16.

1. As we want the light to give off a warm sensation, let's tweak the bloom values to something closer to yellow. Modify each of the six tints ever so slightly, going in the yellow direction:

Next up, we are going to be looking at the other effect we are going to be adjusting, the lens flares. This is a nice addition to the bloom we've just set up, and I like to work with them in tandem. Let's look at how to set it up:

1. Next up, jump to the Lens Flares section, which is a bit further down below the previous Bloom category. Tick the Intensity checkbox and set its value to something such as 90, just so the effect is clearly visible.

1. Change the BokehSize from the default 3 to something such as 6 in order to make the effect even more visible:

Something else we could also change is the actual shape of the Bokeh effect. The setting named BokehShape lets us do just that, so let's take advantage of it as we introduce our last adjustment.

1. Tick the BokehShape checkbox and click on the dropdown menu. Click on the View Options icon and select Show Engine Content; luckily for us, Unreal comes with a couple of different bokeh textures that we can try out. Start typing bokeh to narrow down the search results and select the texture named Bokeh. This introduces a nice round filter which we'll use in this case:

With all of this done, we should be looking at our final image, which should look something like the following screenshot:

As you can see, these are effects that can have a great impact on our scenes, especially when we have multiple light sources. Playing around with the settings until you get to the point where everything feels nice is something that I hope has become easier after this recipe. See you in the next section!