those are great too, yes. not sure why he doesn't. I've seen some artefacts that opne might not want at times in a render (that was with CS3, maybe C5 has it fixed). Light cones from spot lights tend to disable anti-aliasing in CS3 for example (that's different from lens flares I know). Anyway, there are tons of types of lens flares. And sometimes it's nicer to have a non-flared 'nude' (aka bare) rendering and try various add-ons / post fx without having to re-render it all over. post work can be much faster. But I'm speaking for myself. Not sure what BT's plans are in this instance. There are some Nova effects in here too: http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/tuts/backgrounds Thing is if you find a lens flare is too intense, 3 hours after doing the 3D rendering, do you want to re-render it? A small preview window can not show everything there is to see in the final render. Dogwaffle for example has a tool called 'Fade last action' in the top of the Filter menu, or as a middle-click-drag on the undo button. It let's you reduce the intensity of the most recent tool's action, a bit like an interactive undo that lets you fade from between 100% down to 0% seamlessly until you get it exactly right.