Render a Starship Shield Impact - Blender 2.5 - page 53

The row starts with a Render Layer node, using the Fighters renderlayer. We
then proceed to do a strong lifting of brightness in the first RGB Curves node in
this row. A side processing of the image buffer performs a clamping of colors (both
to the let and right) and then blurs the resuling clamped image. Finally we mix the
result of the first RGB Curves node of this row with the result of the Blur node. The
purpose here is to start brightening up the original image buffer (it's very dark) and
then create a very high-contrast image to blur, to get nice blurred highlights in the
space fighter. The final Mix node ( Mix mode and 0.5 Fac ) is just the standard way of
mixing images when the only important thing is to mix colors.