"whiteness" in center of bright colored lights - what is it called? When a source of colored light is very bright, it's center appears white. What is the term I need to look for so I can implement this in my shader? I have added an image which is an example of what I mean. Obviously there is also some bloom going on but that alone doesn't cut it. The search results for &quot;opengl glow&quot; don't seem vey promising either, that just gives me more bloom, not white centers.
I have thought about blending a white emission with the desired color like in this question/answer. However, as you can see that turns the emission pink, not red.
So what I'm really after is a tinted light, glowed, with high (color) contrast.
In general this is caused by HDR tone mapping. Tonemap curves typically decrease saturation as the input light gets brighter, so that very bright lights are rendered closer to white on the display. If bloom is rendered in HDR (prior to tonemapping) then the bloom around the light can still be highly saturated since it is of a lower intensity than the light itself, and so doesn't get desaturated by tonemapping as much.
You can see some good examples of this on the UE4 Color Grading and Filmic Tonemapper docs page. Unreal uses the ACES tone mapping curve, which is a pretty good default tone curve that you can easily hook up in your own shader code as well.
That said, lightsabers in Star Wars games are probably a special case visual effect that's tuned specifically to reproduce how they look in the movies. :)