Boris FX Sapphire Plug-ins

About Boris FX Sapphire Plug-ins

Sapphire is the effects set that finishing artists install once and then use on nearly every job. It covers around three hundred effects and well over three thousand presets, grouped into families: lighting and glows, lens flares, blurs and distortions, textures and grain, stylise looks, and a transition set that goes far beyond a cross dissolve. The quality bar is high enough that shots which would otherwise be sent out to a specialist stay in house.

It installs into host applications rather than running on its own. The package registers into After Effects and Premiere Pro, into Photoshop for the still image effects, and into any OFX host such as Resolve, Nuke, Vegas or Flame. One installation covers every host present on the machine, and the parameter sets stay consistent between them so a look built in one place transfers.

The lens flare and lighting tools are the headline. S_LensFlare ships with a designer that builds a flare element by element with proper anamorphic streaks and iris shapes, and the whole thing tracks to a point in the shot rather than sitting statically over the frame. The glow, rays and light leak families cover most of the atmospheric work an edit needs.

Rendering is GPU accelerated throughout, which is the practical difference between an effect that previews in real time and one that stops the timeline. On a machine with a current card, a stack of several Sapphire effects on a high resolution comp still scrubs, and the render queue finishes in a fraction of the CPU-only time.

What is included in this build

• Around three hundred effects with more than three thousand presets across all families
• Lens flare designer with anamorphic streaks, iris shapes and tracked positioning
• Glow, rays, light leaks and atmospheric lighting families
• Blur, warp, distortion and time based effects with per-channel control
• Large transition set covering wipes, warps, dissolves and light based moves
• Film grain, texture, damage and stylise looks for period and treated footage
• Installs into After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop and any OFX host at once
• GPU accelerated rendering with a preset browser that previews on hover

Changed in version 2026.51

• New transition presets added across the light and warp families
• Faster preview generation in the preset browser
• Improved GPU scheduling on machines with more than one card
• Flare designer handles very wide aspect ratio comps correctly
• Reduced host launch time when a large preset library is installed

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Close every host application completely, including any background render node.
2. Disable real-time protection for the length of the install.
3. Extract the archive and run the installer as administrator.
4. Tick only the hosts that are actually present on the machine during the host selection stage.
5. Reopen the host and let it rescan the plugin folder on first launch, which takes a minute or two.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title