[Music] [Richard Harrington] Thank you all for coming. Happy last class at MAX. I hope you guys have had a great conference.

Good.

We're going to be talking about Creating Content Using Photoshop and After Effects. This class is about half Photoshop half After Effects. So we'll kind of work our way through that material. And I'm glad to be joining you. My name's Rich Harrington, and this is an area that I've spent a lot of time playing with through the years.

So the official description of this session is we're going to help you take your Photoshop skills and translate those into After Effects skills. That's going to include getting things set up correctly inside of Photoshop. That's going to include knowing a little bit about keyframes in Photoshop before we move to keyframes in After Effects. And I'm going to show you different types projects that you could do, with, you know, pretty much just Photoshop content. So it should be pretty straightforward, sort of, things. I think it'll be fun.

Along the way too, these are skills that should translate between the different applications fairly seamlessly. So that's one of the great things about these two programs is how well they work together. Many people refer to After Effects as a Photoshop with a timeline, for example. And then, of course, Photoshop got its own timeline. So, you know, that analogy no longer worked, but it gives you the same, sort of, things. There's blending modes, there's layers, there's masks, there's effects, there's lots of ways to put all those pieces together.

So that's some of the stuff we're going to be looking. As I said, my name's Rich Harrington. I'm a visual storyteller, and I've worked in a variety of capacities through the years. I started my career out as a journalist, but I had a side graphic design business straight out of college where we did work with restaurants and bands, and I was publishing a website with audio and video clips back in 1995. So when I tell you that I am old and opinionated, that's both true. And I've probably failed more times than most people have tried, but I keep creating and pushing the limits and trying new things. So that's my job. Through the years, I've published a lot of books, put out a lot of courses on LinkedIn, I show up randomly in lots of people's searches when they go looking for the hard things in Photoshop. I did a video series for the Adobe team years ago of all the things that people click the No button when they said, "Was this article helpful?" And I got the **** assignment of fixing all those, but it was fun 'cause I didn't want a boring job. So that's what I enjoy doing. And I am into photography and software and lots of other things. Through the years, I've helped design a lot of these products, worked on these products. Right now, I work on a product called Mylio Photos, which is a digital asset manager, that is privacy focus, that is cloud-independent, that lets you use your own storage, and browse, and search, and find everything, and it has the ability to keep all your devices in sync. So when you're on the road and you forget something, you could pull it down. You need something from home. You got a laptop. You pull out your phone. You can get access to everything. And I also work on Radiant Photo, which is an AI image editor, and does some fun things. But those are tools I've worked on through the years. So that's me. And when I get a chance, I get brought into TV networks to help them be a little bit more efficient. And from time to time, I help software companies figure out hard problems. So today, we're going to do a lot of fun things. And at the end, I have some prizes. So if you stay to the end, you get prizes, or at least some things. I'd like to know a little bit about you, though, so that we, kind of, understand who's in the room and some of your goals or objectives. So how many of you would identify as being primarily a designer? Okay, most of you. You read the description. You work in the video space mostly. Okay? Animation? Okay. Web? Okay. Print? Oh, good. It's still alive. All right. And your thoughts-- That was a bad joke, I apologize, but I work in video. So, you know, we get the same ****.

After Effects, your relationship with it. So, you know, as you work in After Effects, do you describe it as scary? Be honest. It's okay, all right. It's fine. It's okay. You kind of don't feel intimidated. You find it fun. Good. You rule it. You're in charge. All right. Not as many. Okay, so we're going to be talking out first animation in Photoshop. And look at that, it's 5:30. We got all the nonsense out before the official class time. Let's jump in. So Photoshop does have some animation capabilities built in. They are not amazing, but they are useful. And if After Effects is intimidating to you, or you're just working in Photoshop and you just want to stay there, they are capable. So we're going to talk first about sizing documents for animation, organizing with layers, and why you might want to use Smart Objects some of the time. First off, though, I'll point out, I got a little folder structure here called a Common Media Folder. I use this in almost all my projects because here's a shocking fact. Adobe has no single media management utility. Every single application either has or doesn't have a media manager that doesn't talk to any of the other media managers. So when you design in Photoshop, and then you go to After Effects, things aren't managed, and then you go to Premiere, meaning it's really easy to lose your ****. So you have to be the grown up because nobody has decided to make a media manager at Adobe because it's not sexy. So set your folders up so you don't lose stuff. So this is my default workflow. You could do whatever you want, but I put everything into, you know, standard folders. This is where my source video goes. I put my project files here. I have source things here, logos, fonts, Photoshop files, Illustrator files, right? Renders, audio, stock, exports, and, of course, the legal paperwork and documents so we could pull things back. We've been using this in my studio for 25 years of business. It has saved our bacon time and time again. It is basically human organization rather than relying on a machine to collect your files 'cause every time you do bad things happen. So just take it upon yourself. And remember, you could take that folder structure, zip it, put it on a server, Dropbox, Adobe Cloud, whatever. And every time you start a new project, just pull it down, unzip it, rename it with the name of the project number and the client, and use it so that you don't get hosed when you are jumping between programs. All right. That was the project manager taking for a moment and the business owner, but, you know, you do you, desktop files all the way. Okay, so what do we do? So first off, a really common graphic to make is something simple like a lower third. This is used to identify speakers. It's not anything special, but it is commonly used. And what you'll find when you use a graphic like this is that you'll often want to identify who a speaker is in video. Now I want to bring this up here because it's also going to help us illustrate an important concept which is when you make a new document, and you're making it for, say, an online video, a broadcast video, anything else, notice there are actually presets across here. So you could choose film and video.

And then there's all these blank presets here for all of the different sizes that you might actually need, which is pretty cool. So HDTV, for example, 1080p, right? Don't worry about HDV and DVCPRO HD. These have been, like, dead for years, but, you know, why go back and clean up after yourself? 4K UHD, it's right there. Like, it should go from here to here 'cause from here to here is freaking useless. But so here to here, there you go, 1080 4K. You're good. When you click, it also gives you these useful guides. So these guides are important to note, although they're actually wrong. These are the guides we needed for standard definition television, and Adobe still hasn't updated these. I've filed bug reports. I've submitted things. Did I mention I don't work for Adobe? With this attitude, it's no wonder why, right? But I do love the products. I just wish that they would make your job easier by not giving you bad info built into the product itself. These guides are for standard definition television, the 4:3 stuff you watch Sesame Street on, if you're old enough, or the things your parents looked at, and you're like, "Why did you ever look at that?" It's awful. So you want to keep any graphic within this outermost box if it involves text. In the old days of television, we would keep them in this inside box, which was the 80% zone, but since we've had high-definition TV, it is 90 and 92% are the bleed zones. So just use the outer box, and that will tell you where to put stuff. Now we design edge to edge just like you have margins, or you might have overbleed in a print project, but anything that's meant to be red or consumed comfortably needs to fall inside of this outside box, the 90% zone, okay? Now that's easy enough. And you can see here that I've done just that. I've kept things within reason so that I can see the logos. Everything's fine. That works. But I want to point out that while you might not have seen it, there is actually a Photoshop timeline that you can open, Window, Timeline, simple enough. Once you've done that, then it's pretty easy to use that timeline to do things. So here we are. And in this case, what I've done is I just added some basic keyframes, position and opacity. I started where it ended up there, turned on my stopwatch for a position and opacity. Boom. And then I went to the beginning and did a little free transform and an opacity fade just to animate things, right? So that makes it really straightforward if we want to do some simple animation. Let's just take that back. There we go. So you can do fades and moves. And that little wavy text is that strange Text Warp tool up here that for some reason they actually let you keyframe and animate. So you can use the bulges, the waves, the ripples, all of those things, and actually animate those properties here for some very basic text animation within. Now this is not a fancy project. This is like low school, total beginner stuff, I'm just showing you here to illustrate the few fundamentals, which is don't put text right up against the edge make sure you have a little bit of bleed room. With the transparency you have here, if you need to export with transparency, when you export from Photoshop, all you need to do when you choose to render out your video is you're going to include the alpha channel when you choose render video. So you could choose File, Export, Render Video, can't use an MPEG-4 if you want transparency. You're going to have to switch that there to QuickTime. And then, unfortunately, Adobe didn't pay the licensing fees that they did for all of their other products for great codecs like ProRes, and you get stuck with animation, which was codec that was made about 35 years ago and is ridiculously large and doesn't play back smoothly. And I don't know why they haven't fixed that yet either. But it's there. And you can render it out, and that will include transparency, when you do. And then, of course, you could rerender process things, but this is how you get transparent animations out of Photoshop. Or if you're going to make an animated GIF, then you can export out a image sequence and then reassemble that into a GIF. That's the short version, the basics. Nothing too fancy there.

Now let's talk about something else that's fun.

When we are in Photoshop and we start to extract things to layers, we can use tools to, you know, remove things. So I just, you know, did a select object, touched it up a little bit, and you're going to find that in Photoshop, we actually have, you know, a Puppet Tool. So you can add pins, you can start to, kind of, transform things, and that's great. Maybe you've played with the Puppet Tool before. It's okay. But it's really amazing when you take that into After Effects with layers. So, for example, let me show you what you can do with a layered file.

So here...

I just keyframed things...

I took the hands, right, and we're going to animate them like this.

And those hands can actually bend and transform over time. Now this is loading the frames here. This isn't real-time animation yet. See, it says it's caching them. But you can add pins and push and pull and take the layered file as if it was made out of elastic or rubber, and, kind of, bend and distort them to do things.

So let's do that on a different object here. And, oh, by the way, you see this is a 3D light, so this hand casts a shadow on that hand. So you can do cool things. And if you look at this, from what we call, god or director view, you kind of get an idea of what's happening, right, like we have one hand in front of the other hand, and they're casting light on each other. So that's what happens. So let's do a real simple one.

Background. I'm pretty sure you could figure out how to remove the bird from the photo. Cut the bird out on its own layer, and then think like an animator. Put a foreground layer in. Everyone good? So then what we can do is grab our Puppet Tool, okay? So the Puppet Tool is up here. It's the Pin Tool, and you can click on an object to add an animation point and where things are going to, kind of, move around. And then additionally, you can say you want to see the mesh and even control what that mesh looks like, so it has a flexibility there.

You can also go in and take the Starch Tool to, sort of, anchor things like, "Hey, I don't want that foot or the butt moving." So far so good. We've just added some pins. Now here's where it gets really cool.

Hidden is if you hold down the Command key on a Mac, Control key, you see how that turn to a stopwatch? Now I could just draw in real-time.

All right. So...

Now my bird's like better than your bird.

So it's a lot of fun. You can, like, cut up Photoshop layers and just, kind of, like, stretch them and animate them and do really simple stop motion animation here, you know. And remember, when you have keyframes, it's really easy to just select a layer and say, hey, U for user-added keyframes, and you're going to see them. You can click on them then, and if you need to slow the animation down, just hold down the Option key as you drag, and they stretch the keyframes out exponentially so you can slow down that animation. And so now you can retime it so it doesn't have to be so over the top. See? So that was U for user added keyframes, and then I just coordinate them out by dragging to spread them out over time.

If you do that right and you put that little thing out front, look at the leaf there. See, I just kind of made the leaf interact with the bird body, and now it looks even better. So two planes of animation is much more believable than one plane of animation. And then you could add a little camera zoom or a scale on this. And all of a sudden, you've got a really piece of compelling animation, whether it's an animatic, or a storyboard, or something to put on the web. And, you know, and this is, like, way better than a cinemagraph, right, much more interesting. And you don't need a lot for it. Does that make sense at a high level? I don't want to, like, spend all the time at techniques. This is called Puppet Tool. And so if you just do a search for my name and Puppet Tool, you'll find longer videos and downloadable files so you can play with it, but I also want to point out something really important.

I had to laugh when in the bag, like they made a big deal out of putting sticker thing in there or a pin in there that says, "I don't name my layers." Clearly, you've never gone to After Effects. Please name your freaking layers because there's no icons, there's no cheat. Like, 'cause, like, if you got in here and it was, like, background, background copy, background copy two, you'd be like-- Okay, I like, "Photoshop lets you choose, like, here's a pretty thumbnail for those of you who can't type." Please name your layers, or you'll not be happy. All right, everyone good so far? All right. Cool. Let's keep going.

And last little thing there when you do name things, sometimes when you are starting to prep your stuff, I would encourage you to think about how you get all the pieces ready. So in this case here, you know, I have my background. I took my type, if you're using a layer style, like, maybe you added a Drop Shadow to this. By the way, I want to point out that you can actually drag those around. Most people don't know those are interactive. You can spread that. You know, you got the ability there to, sort of, play with those things. You can add your outer glow, all sorts of things, right? So there's many ways to play with this. A lot of times, as you do that, though, you might realize that you want to tweak it. So a lot of folks don't know is you can right-click here, and you can actually take the Layer Styles. And, you know, you can go ahead and Rasterize the Layer Style. See? And it kind of just pulled it there and applied it permanently. Or if you're going to do that, here's a little trick, duplicate the layer, turn that one off, click on this, and just totally reduce...

Not the main opacity, but the fill opacity.

And now you're, kind of, left with just the Layer Style on its own. So you can do that for fun things, or even if you were playing with that, like you maybe want to apply a bevel. Now you, kind of, have like instant jelly bug or a really cool watermark that you can use over a live video file. So those are really useful, and you can play with that fill opacity. We're going to come back to Layer Styles later. There's a really amazing integration that's about 85% perfect with After Effects. So we can actually animate those layer styles in After Effects, which is a lot of fun. All right. Did everybody get the key takeaway there? Certain sizes work well with video, if that's your target, or, of course, you can make it for the web. Don't put things right up to the edge. Name your layers. Okay. Good. And Puppet Tool's really fun and very weird. Okay, so Styles. If you go in and you use Layer Styles, these are ancient tech. And they don't always get the best name, but you can find tons of these on the web. You can use these. They're great. And they also work really well on text. When you go into a tool like After Effects and you import things, you have the ability to tell the Layer Styles to import as a live effect, okay? So let me just get rid of that. So when you import that and you navigate to your document with Layer Styles.

There we go.

And you select it.

You could choose down here to import as footage and, you know, and it's going to prompt you on the way in, "Oh, what do you want to do with the Layer Styles? Do you want to merge so they're perfectly exactly like they were in Photoshop? Or are you willing to roll the dice, and some of them won't work perfectly, but let them be animatable? Animatable. You're going to see what I mean in a minute. The ability to add keyframes to it. So I brought in some of those ones like this, and you can actually animate that. Let's zoom in so it's a little easier to see.

You can animate things like the anchor point, the reflection. See how the glint is just slowly moving across. It's really, kind of, cool. You see that? So there, it's not in real-time yet. It's caching, but I want to point out here how easy this is. Because when you bring that in and twirl it down, you'll see that the layer style is all there. And so you could do things like I did here and simply choose to animate one of those core properties. So let's go right there. Perfect. And so all I did was come down here to the bevel effect, and I animated things like the angle and altitude of the light. So watch. I started there, and I went, sort of, towards the end and just change the angle of the light. You see how light glints? And lowered the altitude a little bit.

And it's like a 3D light drifted across the surface. Look, it's like practically real 3D lighting effects.

So you could do some really amazing subtle typography here for animated ads, banner ads, things like that, where you could just have a little gentle glint. You could do this on the bevel, the glow, the fill, the color, all of those. So when you bring in something with a Layer Style from Photoshop, you're able to tweak it. By the way, and we'll talk more about this in a moment, but most people don't realize that you can actually take the Photoshop text layer and convert it. So, you know, if I brought that text in like this, I can select it here and just say, "Hey, you know, go ahead and create...

Editable text." Bam. And now that's live text.

Right? So now you can actually tweak that and modify it. So your Photoshop designs can be animated or edited when you're in After Effects. Everyone good with that? So you can convert that Photoshop layers to perfectly live text. There is no spell checker in Photoshop. There's, kind of, a spell checker inside of After Effects, there's, kind of, one in Photoshop, so spell check before you come over. Okay, Modes.

I want to point out that with very little, you can create all sorts of content. So blending modes are, kind of, the designer secret sauce. A lot of you know this. You know, you can mix things together. You could take different pieces and, kind of, give it life, right? So you can go in and, you know, pull these things together. And here's what I did. Let's just not save that. There we go. I have a couple of simple layers, right? Layer number one.

And all I did was I twirled it down, and I just hit or I hit S for scale. And I just did a little simple stretch animation. Pretty simple, right? Just stretch it on the x-axis. So you could see here that you can add properties. Oh, I want to do a little bit of a rotation animation as well, R for rotation.

And at the end here, I'll just do a very slight turn.

So now that's, kind of, stretching and turning. Does that make sense to everyone? Then I put on another layer, and I just change its blending mode, screen mode, and I did a little animation on it. See? Boom. It's, kind of, growing towards you. And then I did another one, just a real simple layer, another stock texture, nothing fancy. And with that, same thing, did a little another piece of animation and growth. And all of a sudden, it starts to take shape and make a background.

Toss on in adjustment layer, and there's a wonderful effect called Colorama that I'm going to reset for a moment here. And so if you ever applied the Colorama effect, you would immediately go, "Who the hell invented this?" Right? It's like rainbow color, obnoxious, ugly. But especially when it's in a normal layer mode, it's just awful. It's like a gradient map, but you can go in and there's some more useful presets in here and start to explore some of these and play with them. Like, "Hey, do ramp blue." And then you decide where it ramps the colors.

Or what colors it's going to actually ramp. And so I can go from a blue to, sort of, a lighter blue...

Right? And you could play with that ramping. Oh, start up there at the highlights, and then let's make this go a little darker. Cool. And so you could play with how those ramp effects are applied. So that's all I did here was I just did a little ramping effect and I put it into a mode that blended, so Soft Light is a good one, Overlay is a good one. And see now, all of a sudden, you've got a nice gradient map on it, and you're able to make your own simple textured backgrounds to serve as a background for things you're building. Does that make sense to everyone? The basics, just a little stretch over time, let them mix together, I mean, practically, it looks like we're going through water here, like, we're underwater. So it's a lot of fun. Then real simple, Layer, New, Solid.

Sample on whatever your dark shadow is. Feel free to make it a touch darker.

Click OK. Come up here and choose the elliptical tool and double-click, and you get a mask.

MM will give you the mask properties. I invert it.

I feather it. And I blend it. Multiply mode is perfect for shadows.

T for Opacity, if you want to adjust or just twirl down. And by putting a little vignette on there with the darker colors at the edge, we pull the viewer's eye into the center. Vignettes or power windows are not just kitschy effects. They do serve a purpose, but they need to be subtle. By darkening the edge of the frame, we pull the eye into the middle of the frame where the action is. And if you didn't want it in the middle, like, let say you had a logo or it was offset for a reason, just click on the mask, Command-T for the mask, right? And you can actually, sort of, change the shape of that and, kind of, adjust where that mask is going to go and where that should be to guide the viewer's focus with that darkening edge, okay? So that's a real simple effect there that you can do to, kind of, create a spotlight of where you want people to look. Everyone okay? All right, let's keep going.

So blending modes work really, really well. And what's cool about that is that you can use these things. I'll just show you like an end result. So I had a logo, and the client wanted to make a little bit of one for an animation. Now when you get this thing happening, that's always fun. It's like, "Oh, where'd the logo go? It got lost." So that does happen. What you can do if that happens is just double-click on something and then all you have to do is navigate to the folder where it was stored and then tell it where to look. So if I find that under the footage icon here and I point it at the individual file...

After Effects will reconnect everything, okay? So that's what it was. I broke that on purpose, but I'm sure you run into that and you freaked out because it's like, "Where the hell is everything?" Just go find one of the offline items, double-click, and then go look for it, and then everything reconnects.

So that little simple background trick I showed you, I made it loop.

All I did to make it loop was I just cut it in half and put a little opacity fade there in between it. So see here, real simple, and it just is going to do a little cross dissolve to itself.

And I made a seamless loop...

Like that. Then we put a very basic animation on top of it...

And we built a simple little square icon with this logo. Bam. And so now we have an animated social media icon that many sites will support, or you can use it on different platforms, or for an avatar, or things like that as a very simple animation. Nice little branding piece. And because it's looping, it doesn't jump when it's in the timeline. If making your own loop seems hard, it really isn't. Again, since it's the last class, I could do this. Go to the middle of the footage.

Put it like this with a little cross dissolve in the middle, and these two pieces at the ends perfectly line up. And that's a poor man loop, or a poor woman loop, and it's super simple. And with stuff like this, all day long, you can make these very gentle animations that are good for social media, okay? You guys hanging in there, okay? All right. Let's go on to another easy thing.

This one's fun. So let's talk about...

The Photoshop timeline, okay? So if this is the last major thing we're going to do in Photoshop, your Photoshop timeline is capable of doing transitions. So in this case, if I open up a layered file, you see how we have all of our layers here.

When you make your video timeline, you can now go layer to layer...

And just keyframe it, which is what we did here, right? We'll just go over to the beginning. And so on each layer, you can add different transformations. You can change the layers, okay? And so I just put simple transitions on things with little fades and moves.

So if you needed to export something like a loop or you had a series and you wanted a little more control than PowerPoint 'cause you want to actually, kind of, edit it to the music. [Music] You can.

And there are basic transitions here. They're right here. So you can actually add transitions to your layers and keyframe them or add moves. And then again, render out an MPEG-4, and you're ready to go. So right within Photoshop, you could take a layered document and produce a very simple animation with a timeline. Now I want to go a little deeper. So this is not fancy, but I'm going to show you how we can make a cinemagraph, which is where you could take a piece of footage or a still and freeze frame part of it and make the rest animate, okay? So a lot of people don't realize that you can actually open up a movie file into Photoshop. So you can do this in After Effects too. Either way, it doesn't matter, but we'll do this in Photoshop, and then we'll go to mostly After Effects workflow. But when you open that up, you can start in Photoshop and just basically, you know, make your new document. I'm going to go with 800x800 square.

And then what you can do is place the video file in. I'll just say Place Embedded one. And navigate to your video file that you want to use. And that's going to open it up as a Smart Object. Now it doesn't have to be a Smart Object, but the benefits of the Smart Object is you can apply filters to it, and you can do other things with the file. So you could choose a movie file, drop it in, and then scale it as needed to taste. See? Boom.

That works pretty easily, and I'm just going to create a video timeline here.

See? And this part here, I don't want the part of it, sort of, pouring in.

So perfect right there. I'm just going to say cut.

Delete that part.

We don't want that little bobble. So right about there. Good.

Go forward.

And I'm going to cut it right about there.

So right now, I'm getting close, and I'm going to make a little perfect loop. So we'll just split it in the middle, pull this one forward...

Like so, and this one this way.

And then up here, just drop in a little fade...

Like so.

And now what we have is a perfect loop, okay? So when this plays, it's perfectly looped.

But here's the thing.

If you want to get the smallest file size, you need the least amount of motion possible. So even though it looked like a locked-off video, there might have been subtle movement, or noise, or grain, and that's going to dramatically increase the size of the cinemagraph or the GIF when you export it. So select all...

Copy Merged, paste, and put a flattened copy on top...

Then you could just toss on a layer mask and paint away the spot where you wanted the animation to come through.

So in this case, I just want that area animated. I just, kind of, look and say, "Oh, yeah, let's have the water pour right about there, and I'm just using the mask there on the edge of the teacup." Boom. And now we have a cinemagraph, a photo with partial motion. We took a video clip, and we, kind of, position it. Now obviously, trim your layer. So it ends at the same spot. Add any text or anything else you want, and then export as a GIF or an MPEG-4 file, and you've got content ready to post to social media. Does that make sense to everyone? Slow motion clips, video clips, stock clips, you could totally make loops this way and export content. It's really simple. Export as a GIF with file safe for web, or file export render video to make an MPEG-4. MPEG-4, much better color, it's going to work great, but it may not loop depending upon the platform. GIFs can always loop. So it's really easy to post that content everywhere, but less color.

Okay, let's do the migration to After Effects now. So when we start a project and we begin to import our things into After Effects, we need to be mindful as we bring the content in. So when you navigate to your content and you start to select it, you want to make sure that you tell it how to come in.

So, for example, if I choose the Illustrator file, I could bring that in as flattened footage, or as a composition with layers.

And when I bring that in, it would bring in any layers if they existed. But you have to actually make the layers in After, or in Illustrator before you did that. So you could split something into layers there, of course. Same thing with Photoshop. Navigate to a Photoshop file, and you could bring that in with layers or an SVG, bring that in as vector. The benefit here of this is pretty simple. So now as you start to add those pieces in, they come through. But if working with vectors, please be sure to pay attention to this switch. This switch is called Continuously Rasterize. So if you've scaled up a vector file and you don't click that, it's going to look all jaggy. You have to click that so that it keeps it as a vector file the whole time. If you don't, it doesn't translate, okay? So like if that's turned off, see how that's all jagged now and looks low res. Soon as you click that little sun icon, which, of course, would mean Continuously Rasterize. Now it's going to hold up just fine, okay? And blending modes, all of that can come through just fine as you build things, okay? Easy enough? Okay. Let's go to something not so easy then. We're going to keep building up in intensity. All right. So as we start to build our pieces, there's going to be times that I want to get a little more elaborate. So there's a really cool, amazing thing in Photoshop, called Vanishing Point. And it lets you draw perspective planes on objects. See, all the people who walked and left are like, this is really basic. It's not going to end basic. We just start basic so that everybody can stand. So here we've drawn out perspective planes, and we can hand those off to After Effects. So I could actually draw on things and create it. So if you're in Photoshop, you have an amazing tool called Vanishing Point. And it's really weird 'cause normally it's used for cloning. So if you've never used it, Vanishing Point is right here. And let's just maximize this window. You basically like click and draw to illustrate where a surface is.

Does that, kind of, make sense there, like, see the surface? And then if you hold on the Command key, you could tear off another surface going this way. And then, kind of, angle it so it lines up with that wall. And then just, sort of, extend it down. Does that make sense? And then you can drag the floor off...

And, kind of, extend your floor a little bit and create an actual ground plane. See? And so you can go in and take those different surfaces. Let's angle that just a little bit down. There we go. And I'll extend that to there, and then we'll angle that one down just a little bit, like so.

And then in the world's most discoverable place, you would magically know to click on this menu and choose Export for After Effects 'cause, of course, it just jumped out at you. One more hamburger menu. So now you call that building and save it. And it's a VPE file. And what it did is it created a bunch of PNGs and a 3D model. Now we can go in later. And, oh, while I was at it, the reason why Vanishing Point was really made was so that, like, you could take a clone tool and, like, click over here, and then come here, and it would actually clone and adjust the size, based on, like, where you clicked and it would scale things up or down. It was, like, meant to be for repairing. Over here in After Effects, what we can do is we can then choose Import, and you'll find Vanishing Point there.

Navigate to your VPE file that you created...

And click Import. And what it does is it brings it in as a little 3D model with everything. And you can clean these layers up, that's fine. But now that 3D camera can do really simple things like, "Hey, camera, go ahead here, and start over here with the point of interest." And then over 30 seconds, move the camera like that and, kind of, pan over here to this side of the building.

And now you got a real simple little animation, kind of, floating around the box.

Does that make sense? So you could take flat objects and make basic 3D objects out of them and do cool things with them. So, you know, I showed you a little bit more elaborate version of that, but that was to get you, sort of, inspired. And so here's another example. I took the street and I just drew out the main street and then the sides of the building.

And so what that looks like when you animate it is this.

I just did a really fun animation where it, kind of, feels like we're lifting off the street.

That's so much cooler than just doing a little pan and zoom on the photo. Do you see how that feels like three-dimensional, like, we're going up the side of the wall? Because we are. Okay? Let's look at this here. Let's go to two views. On the right here, we'll set this to the active camera view, like, what are we seeing through the camera. And on the left here, it looks like the death star run, right? Like, we actually created a little tunnel with the side walls, and the camera is moving through that 3D space. Like, see that? Like, it's zooming back along the surface of the road and pulling up. So Vanishing Point is really kind of cool because you could take a photo that has some depth to it and mark out the depth planes, and then animate a camera, kind of, moving through. You can't like create a whole 3D world. This isn't like I have one picture, and suddenly it's the Mandalorian. But you can go in-- Clearly too much Disney plus. I mean, you can go in and do these nice basic, sort of, moves on your surface there and create a really nice feeling and something a little bit more compelling from a single object, okay? Is this making sense to folks? Good. But what happens if you're willing to do the work? Well, if you're willing to do the work, you can do a lot more with this. So here's some sample clips really quick of some of the things that we've done with this. Some of these are basic. Some of them are not so basic. But you can do a lot of fun things. And so if you work on documentaries, or you need to animate ads, or anything like that, what you can do is turn these into compelling fun animations.

Let's just make this a little bigger.

We went over to Camp Westin, you know, doing the day a lot after the other girls began to come down. I had my little Brownie camera along, and I think I still have some of the pictures that I took with that little camera. We got around and had a good time while they were there. We were all together on the grounds that evening. All the girls, their husbands, and Edith's boyfriend, we just sat around and talked and-- This one guy came by, and I had, of course, my little Brownie camera, and John and I asked him to take a picture.

And he did. He took a picture of all of us. And finally about dusk, John says, "Okay, man, fall in. We got to go." It was the 22 day of September...

1942. That was the last time that, that we saw him.

So this was a documentary about a town that lost almost half of its, you know, young man to World War II and the impact on that town. But here's that Vanishing Point effect with some particles. I've never forgotten. See? Same thing. That was just Vanishing Point, and we added in some smoke.

Make sense? Pretty fun stuff. And then we just cut out silhouettes of people...

Right? Here it is Vanishing Point effect with some particles for smoke and snow.

So you can do some really fun things with that. I have a lot of stuff online about motion control and things. So you can look that up. But it's fun. And I just, kind of, wanted you guys to wrap your head around how you can push that technique and what you can do. So what that really requires is something simple. I'll do a simple example, and then we'll do a more elaborate example.

And so all you have to do is cut it out and put it into space, right? So here is the Photoshop file. And all we did was cut that Photoshop file into layers. This is only two layers. The background and the lion cut out into its own layer. And I just use Clone and Content-Aware Fill and other things, and you probably now with Generative Fill. This would be way easier. You know, select the object, cut it its own layer, Generative Fill, remove object. I mean, you know, I'm sure the AI could do better than that, but you don't have to be perfect. Because when you do this, it's actually quite simple. So you just open that. And what happens is, is you bring in those objects, right? So there's the lion with the two layers.

Promote those to 3D by clicking on the 3D cube.

Then add your camera, Layer, New, Camera. Now if you know what lens it was shot on, you can actually put that information in.

How would you know what lens a picture was shot on? Anyone? IPTC Metadata. You could just look at that in the IPTC. So if you knew that that was 35 millimeter or a 50 millimeter or anything else, you could assign it right there and actually adjust the depth of field and make the aperture match. It's crazy. You can, like, match up the F-Stop of the virtual camera with the real photograph with its real focal length with its real F-Stop. So now you got a little virtual camera.

Now this next part might seem tricky, but it's not. I'm doing this with just a two-layer image to make it as simple as possible, but you could do this with dozens of layers. Okay, step one, what I'm going to do with the camera turned on is press the P key for position and we have x, y, and z axes. Okay? X-axis, y-axis, z-axis. I got kicked out of geometry class, but I remembered that. Thank you, Mr. Yashwant, Mount Carmel High School. Okay. Yeah, I got kicked out of my math class 'cause I didn't like the fact that my teacher-- No, I won't go to it. Long story short, I've never been good at keeping my mouth shut. Okay, so I'm going to push this away on the z-axis, so it's in the background. But now I'll just press S for scale, and scale it up a little bit until it touches the edges of the frame.

And so you can keep moving things further away and scaling as needed. And if you had multiple layers, you would just, sort of, spread them out in Z space. So there's the lion, there's the background. If I look at this with two views, I could put the active camera here on one side. And over here, I'm just going to take a look at that with custom view one, right? And we can zoom out a little bit. Comicy. Do you see how easy that was? Like, we got this layer in front of this layer. Does that make sense to everybody? Now we could do cool little things with our camera. And so here's the deal.

When you animate the camera's position, you're doing this. When you animate its point of interest, you're taking the front of the lens and you're pointing it at different things. Does that make sense? When you do an animation on two axes, its way cooler than just ah, ah, ah. That's Photoshop keyframing, right? It's just like basic clunky. After Effects could be really smooth 'cause we could do things on two axes. So I'm going to have this be the end position here, and I'm going to do what I call lazy keyframing. I really don't know what I'm doing. I'm pretending. So I'm going to lazy keyframe and just go like this.

Perfect. 'Cause that's my end state. All right? Like, hey, it's going to end up exactly like it started. It's going to land perfectly on the frame. Then I'll come up here, and I'll say, "Oh, okay, what do I want to do? And here's the deal. You could just grab this camera here and move it. Oh, move it a little closer on the z-axis.

Oh, let's grab the y-axis here and drop just a little lower...

Right? Oh, go ahead with the point of interest and tilt the camera up a little bit, like so. See? So you could do these cool little moves. And if you do it too big of a move, no big deal, you could cheat a little bit. And, you know, I'm just going to zoom the camera in here, just a little with the zoom.

See? So like, I don't overshoot the edge...

Right? Does that make sense? We just grab the camera, manipulate it. Oh, hey, I'd like to turn the camera just a little bit, and I could just grab this little green handle here and turn it.

And oh, let's slide it a little bit here on the x-axis like that. So we, sort of, start on the ball.

Oh, and go ahead and just, sort, of turn it again on the y-axis there. There you go. Boom. Okay, I'm hoping that that doesn't seem nearly as scary as looking at all of these values over here, right? You just, kind of, do it. And because I had the keyframe on, it just added keyframes everywhere we needed it.

And then when you animate, it's going to go ahead and, kind of, move that camera through the scene.

And here's what's cool. You see the paths there? How do you make a path a curve? Anyone? There you go. Convert Vertex Tool, and just click and make it a Bézier...

And grab the handles there, and you get a nice little curve to it. Now in this case, I got just a touch of overshoot, but I could fix that, but watch. Here's that animation...

And it's going to start to pull out. I'm going to make this a little shorter.

Let's just zoom that in there.

Grab them. Pull it up.

And we'll drop the quality here. So under the, animation project here, what we'll do is we'll just open up our window. And I can use my Preview controls and say, "Hey, don't preview at full quality, preview at half quality." How much faster is half quality preview? Anyone want to guess? - How was that? - Five. Nope.

Four times 'cause it's half the width and half the height. And you apparently failed math class too.

Which is okay. We're all in this together, guys. Like, that's the hardest the math is going to get. But would you take something four times faster for it only being half as good to look at for preview purposes? Of course, you should. 'Cause now you're getting almost like real-time performance. And you can work out your ideas here and get the timings down. So when you preview that, it's totally working. Did that make sense? Right? You, kind of, get those ideas worked out. And then just be lazy and circle these and take advantage of things like, oh, Animation, Keyframe Assistant. And you could choose simple options like, oh, go ahead and ease into those and ease out of these. And what happens is, is you're going to get really cool, simple pushes and pulls. So it's a little bit more gentle. And so now if you were to look at that velocity graph, there's a little, like, ramping and acceleration, and you didn't have to do anything. And now you got your cool little simple animation.

Now again, I just have to scale that background up a little bit because it doesn't need to be perfect. So I'll just go right here where it's overshooting and say S for Scale.

There we go. And I'm just going to nudge that just slightly.

And now I'm good. And do you see how we created an animated photograph out of two layers? Now do that with five or six. And all of a sudden, or do that with a Puppet Tool on one of them and other movement. It's pretty cool. You could do a whole bunch of fun stuff. And so that's, kind of, what happened there, and that's what we did here, is I used Vanishing Point and a whole bunch of layers...

And we just move through the town. And the camera just pulls along and reveals this scene and the cast shadow and everything else. So I don't-- Some of you are like, "But I don't work with old photos." Do it with a movie poster, do it with an ad, it doesn't matter. I'm a documentary storyteller, and I work on a lot of docs. You could do this with anything with Photoshop layers. Does that make sense? And just animate them. You can now spread them out along the z-axis and fly your camera through and create these really fun animations for animated movie posters, and social media content, and all sorts of other things. Okay, all right. To carry us cursor end, I mentioned working with type. When you bring in type, remember, it can be made editable. So the benefit of the editable text once you have it in After Effects is there is a myriad of text animation presets. So you select the text layer and you just say, Layer, Convert to Editable Text. Then over here, you have your Effects & Presets. Come to Animation Presets. By the way, there's, like, double those many on After Effects' website. If you just do a search for extra downloadable animation presets, you'll find them. And then what you can do is you can choose to browse those presets. That's going to launch Adobe Bridge, which you probably haven't seen in a while, and it's going to actually show you what those animations look like. And so it's going to give you the ability to, kind of, see a preview for each of those. And so now in Bridge, which apparently just crashed, there would actually be a little Animation Preset. Otherwise, if you don't want to use those presets, you could just come right here and use them. So here we go, 3D text block. Don't Send. Thank you Bridge for crashing. Let's undo.

And so now what we can do is just take that animation and animate it. And so we can come in here and drop it on. So let me just bring that text block in again. There we go. After Effects. And let's bring that in.

Files, Text...

Grab it. And when you bring in your layered text...

Once you've brought it in, and bring it in as editable layers...

Then very easily select it, Layer, Create, Editable Text. Now you can modify it, but you can also come over here and take advantage of all of these different, sort of, text animators.

Some of them are obnoxious, some of them are not. And there's all sorts of choices in here. 3D Text, the ability for things to flip, to fly, to fade in. And every single one of them is a great starting point. So as you work with these, what you're going to discover is that they can give you an idea of where to begin. So if I chose blur and fade in. Now if I twirl this down, I could see all the options that are happening. And I could start to modify them and play with each one.

And so you can go in and customize these animations and retime them, and it's a great way to learn about text animation, but there are hundreds of text animations in here to get you started that you can use to generate animated typography, okay, and a lot more on the internet that are downloadable. Does that make sense to everyone? So browse those, they're a lot of fun. That only work if the text editable, right? Yeah. You have to make it editable. But as long as the font is installed, it's a pixel for pixel match from your Photoshop layer.

So yeah, it just has to be editable, okay? All right. To carry us into the end, we talked about some essential keyframing strategies.

One of the things that I'll point out is that as we are animating in After Effects, there are lots of things we can do to make things a bit simpler. So, for example, let's say you've built out your animation, you've added your keyframes, you're like, "Okay, now what do I do?" Right? I think I'm done, but I want to get this thing out. So, you know, I got my finished result here. You know, real simple design. I'll build this up for you. Okay. Piece of footage.

Easy enough.

Another piece of footage, just applied a mask, okay? Tossed in blending modes, right? Go ahead and actually blend the footage back on top. So here's an interesting concept. A lot of people miss this. Instead of lowering the opacity of the texture layer, don't, right? I just hard mask the texture layer. Take a black and white copy of the footage and then blend it back on top of it, and it's much better and more effective than lowering the opacity of the graphic because what you want to do is stencil the information of the footage over the graphic, not below the graphic off by lowering the opacity of it. So it's like an overprint. See, I do know a few words. Okay, so then what you can do is anything else you need for your shapes, your masks, you can play with all that. And so, you know, I tossed in the color, and again, just changed its blending mode. Multiply is good, Color, Hue, all of those are good. And then we have just a real simple animation. So, like, let's say you were making fun things like this just for signage. When you're ready to spit it out, first up, save your projects, software is known to crash. Composition, Add to Render Queue is where you do all the magic. Here, it gets a little intimidating, but I'm going to break it down for you. First up, under the Render Settings, generally speaking, you're going to stay with Best quality, but I would suggest you look it over and make sure that you haven't modified anything Best and Full, that's usually good. And if you wanted to render everything, choose Length of Comp. If you wanted to render just the area you marked out, then you could choose work area.

Down here is where you need to think about what you're creating.

High quality is not a good choice. I would suggest QuickTime. That's fine. And then look at your Format Options. And so if you're going to professional video, great, 422, that's fine, right? That's going to work pretty well. But you also can, if you need more than one option, come right here and just click to add a second output module. All the processing time is up here in the rendering. This is just writing the file to disc. So I could say, "Oh, hey, up here, I don't want QuickTime. I needed to do an image sequence, or I needed to make an H.264 to post to YouTube." Right? Oh, great. Cool. Yep. Constant. That's good. Good. Oh, yeah. Variable bit rate, that's going to get better file size. And let's set that to about 20 megabits per second since I'm dropping this into a presentation like, PowerPoint.

Cool. Hit OK. Hit OK. Look it over. Tell it where to go, when you're all set. All you're going to do is click the Render button, and it will start to output that, right? So you can choose your project, you know, look it over, mark it for render, and you say, where's it going to go to? I'll be like, everyone else today and put it on our desktop 'cause we're tired. And you could just render that thing out there to your desktop okay? So that's all there is to, kind of, getting that out. We'll just set that up there. There we go, and I'll put that there as well. Now I can render it. But here's the deal. This locks you out of After Effects. You can't do anything else while it's rendering.

That's probably not a good thing. Even if you have nothing else to do, you probably want to keep playing. So if you click Q in Adobe Media Encoder, it will send it to render in the background, and then you can keep working in After Effects, and it will run it in the background and spit it out. Plus media encoder has dozens of useful presets for Vimeo, YouTube, PowerPoint, every preset you would need is in there 'cause it's a dedicated tool to create files. So you don't have to know how to use this really scary interface. You could just kick the project over to media encoder and let it do everything else. Okay. I promised some prizes at the end. First off, I hope you guys picked up a few new ideas and that you, kind of, understand a little bit about the relationship between Photoshop and After Effects. This is meant to be like a launching point for you. I have hundreds and hundreds of free tutorials on the internet. My job today was to make sure that you guys understood the basics and how to exchange things between these programs. But I also threw in some real-time savers for you, like that AME tip, it's going to save you tons of time, make things easier. Okay, now in order for you to keep going, I'll do a few things. First off, if you wouldn't mind, when you get a chance to do the survey, please fill out the survey. It's how they invite us. It's how they decide what programs to run. And if you want more advanced After Effects training, you can tell them that too, and will gladly run it. You know, we'll definitely pop that in. Otherwise, too, if you need to stay in touch, no big deal. I'm pretty easy to find. So you can-- Hopefully, this will work. There you go. If you need to get in touch with me, you can look me up on LinkedIn. I'm definitely around, and I regularly blog at Photofocus. I'm working on software, Mylio and Radiant, and I did promise a few prizes. So don't scramble or panic, but I dropped about 30 postcards that look like one of these. I'll find it or somebody will find it. They're under your chair, but they're not a postcard. They actually have a serial number on it, and it is a copy of Radiant Photo which is an AI image editor. Did you find one? No. You got a tag. I'm sorry. That's a tag that says don't remove. You're totally going to get in trouble, okay? Did anybody find them? Somebody? Yes. There you go. There's one. It looks like that. So that's plugins in software. Have fun with it. You can also download some other free things. So that's Radiant. Check it out. Our mobile app ships next week. If you need a copy of Mylio, let me know. We were giving that out at the booth. And in December, we have the Premiere Pro Summit. And in February, we have the After Effects Summit. These are both free online events, where you can come for the week. If you've ever been to the Photoshop Summit or the Lightroom Summit, same team is putting this together. So a week-long of training, do at your own pace, watch from home. It'll be cold for most of you, so join us for the winter. All right, thank you guys for coming out. And hope you have a great MAX.

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