Roughly forever ago, when I was pushing the idea of extending the Photoshop compositing pipeline to include plug-in modules (which we did kinda succeed with in the form of 3D layers—now sadly ripped out), I loved the idea of layers that could emit & control light. We didn’t get there, of course, but I’m happy to see folks like Boris FX offering some cool new controls:
Optics is everything that the Filter Gallery UI/UX could and should have been. Such a bummer that it was never developed beyond v1.