Darth Maul's Lightsaber

Here are some renders of Darth Maul's double bladed lightsaber.
Check out the creation process on my brand new YouTube channel.
https://youtu.be/1WGcBXrcbHU

Creating the lightsaber was really fun, but the blur effect of the blade behind the hilt really gave me a headache. Even with different view layers I wasn't able to get it right because of the shadows and red light reflections. Therefore, I used Adobe Photoshop to get the blur effect after rendering the image with Blender. Usually, I would have used the glare node of the blender compositor. If you have some solutions without using other software than Blender, please let me know :)