Adding Motion to Your Mix with Photoshop and After Effects

[Music] [Chris Converse] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Adding Motion to Your Mix with Photoshop and After Effects.

So in this session, I'm going to be showing you how to get into After Effects. I'm going to start really slow. And then we'll just slowly ramp this up. So first, let me take a few minutes and tell you about myself. My name is Chris. And let's get going.

So After Effects is actually one of the core design tools in Creative Cloud. If you remember, way back in the olden days when libraries came out or when some of the advanced type tools came out, it came out in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and in After Effects. After Effects has always been in the same group. They all work together. As a matter of fact, the panels are almost the same in all of these applications. They're just named a little bit differently. So inside of After Effects, we have our timeline. This is where we're going to find all of our layers, if you're comfortable with those inside of Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Compositions are what we typically call artboards, canvas, or a page. The project panel, this is where we have all of our links. Anything that you link into After Effects, and everything is links, so nothing is destructive.

We got a links panel in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. You can use place linked, which will work just like the other two. And then finally, we have this idea of a pre-comp in After Effects. And that really is just one composition inside of another composition. It's kind of like working with symbols in Illustrator or importing InDesign into other InDesign files. And so basically, you get an object that you can reuse multiple times throughout your project.

And so if you are familiar with Photoshop, you already have the basics down for After Effects. Now, one of the things that Adobe hears a lot is that After Effects is intimidating because of its interface. And so I would argue and show the slide that there's actually a lot of similarities. It works exactly the same way. Just things are named a little different and they're in a different position as we're going through.

So here's what I wanted to do today. So I appreciate all of you spending the time getting your bodies here, choosing my session. So I was thinking, like, what would I want to see if I was getting in here and I wanted to be inspired to start jumping into After Effects? So here's what I'm going to do. We're going to start off super slow. So if you already know After Effects, you're going to be bored for about seven to eight minutes. I'm going to show you exactly what the interface looks like so that you can get comfortable jumping in and getting started. I'm going to show you how After Effects and Photoshop work together. You can go from Photoshop into After Effects and from After Effects back to Photoshop. It's awesome. So at any time you're uncomfortable in After Effects, you can just dump out to Photoshop and feel comfortable.

I'll show you how animation works, how we can set up keyframes. I'll show you animated presets so that you can quickly apply animations to your project. But I'll show you the keyframes first, because I want you to understand how they work. And then we'll show you how presets work. Then after that, I'm going to just jump into a bunch of different projects and show you a bunch of different effects inside of After Effects that allow you to do all kinds of different things. Everyone in here has got different things you have to do. So I will show you how to put video into After Effects and combine it with your Photoshop files to add animation. I'll show you some effects in After Effects, like the displacement map. So you can have things actually warp and change. How to work with Spherize, so you can take a flat map that you get from Adobe Stock and turn it into an actual globe. And so at that point, I just want you to just see all of these different things that we can do. So I'll go through those rather quickly. I'll tell you exactly the effect that I'm using. And remember that this is being recorded. So you can go back and watch this later. If something in there sounded interesting, you can go back and watch the recording and find exactly the effects that I'm working on. So hopefully, that'll take any of the advanced users in here, give you guys some ideas of what's happening. And mostly, I just want you to be inspired to see all the things we can start to do inside of After Effects and combining that with Photoshop.

All right. Sound good? - [Man] Good. - All right. So let's get started.

So the first thing we'll start with is the After Effects interface. So when you first launch After Effects, this is not the default screen you'll see. You'll see a default screen with all kinds of stuff turned on. It's going to look like an airplane cockpit. And you're going to be like, oh my god, look at all of this stuff. So what I recommend people do is go up to the Window menu, come down to workspace, and choose the small screen setting. I'll just come down here and click on that. Small screen is going to get rid of most of the noise. And it's going to default to those panels that I showed you. We're going to get our timeline panel down at the bottom. This is where all of our layers are. We're going to get the project panel on the left. This is where our links panel is. I'm using InDesign and Illustrator terms at the moment. The composition panel, this is where we create our designs. You can think of this as the artboard or the page. And then we have two extra panels inside of After Effects that we don't have any other tools. Or at least, it doesn't seem like we have them inside of Photoshop. The first one is the effects and presets panel. What this panel does is this is where all of your filters and effects is. This is the same kind of panel you have in Photoshop when you go to the filter menu. Filter, tons of cool stuff that you can do. After Effects is all about effects. Everything that we do in here is applying an effect to our artwork. And then we have the effect controls. The effect controls show us the properties of the effect. So in Photoshop, if you imagine you go to the effects panel, in the layers panel, you apply like a drop shadow. Now, to change the drop shadow, you have to double click on it in Photoshop. You get a dialog box. And then you can change the drop shadow settings. In After Effects, those settings are right here the whole time. So you can just kind of see them. I almost wish we had that in Photoshop. I can just see the settings. I don't have to go back and forth. Properties panel's getting there. So we're seeing a unified piece across all of these.

So right now, we're looking at a completely blank file. So in After Effects, we can actually have a new project that doesn't have anything in it. Imagine if you could have an InDesign file with no pages or an Illustrator file with no artboards. You can't really do that in those. But in After Effects, we have this blank canvas here. It's really a container waiting to import everything into it.

So let me show you quickly what that kind of workflow looks like. I'm going to start. I'm just going to grab a graphic here and just show you the interface. So here we have a gift card graphic. We need to create a promo for this. So one of my favorite ways to work...

Is if I come into my system here.

Let me close my 9000 Windows.

All right. So I grab my gift card. My favorite way to add artwork is to just drag and drop it right into the Properties panel. You can double click in here. You can do file import, place all the things you're probably comfortable with. So now in the Project panel, we have our linked file. So I can click on this. I can get all the information about this file. But notice that I have no composition and I have nothing on the Timeline panel. So inside of After Effects, we have to create a composition before we can use our content. We can think of that as a page. Now you can click these buttons, new composition, or my favorite, let's just grab this. I'm going to just drag and drop this right into the Composition panel.

Let me zoom out. I'll change my zoom down here to fit. That's a really great feature, fit. So now if I scale the window, it'll move up and down. Now, two things happened. One, I got a new composition, which looks like this little movie clip icon here, in my project panel. So this is the artboard. If I scroll down, I now have a layer showing up in the Timeline panel. So now I have what it would look like if I created a new Illustrator or a new InDesign file. I've got a page. I've got one layer and one piece of artwork that's been imported in. So we have to create something inside of After Effects before we can get to this point.

Okay. Sound good so far? So we can go in here and just continually build our content. We have a toolbar across the top. I could add type. I can go and add circles and squares, vector shapes, all this kind of fun stuff. But one of the most powerful things and what we want to focus on today is how After Effects and Photoshop work together.

So I'm going to open up this gift card promo.

And so this is going to be a pretty typical Photoshop file. Over on the left hand side, I have linked smart objects here. So we've got gift card, $25.50. We have our Illustrator logo placed in, some type layers, a shape layer, color layer. And then we've got our background photo that we used Firefly to generate some content for. Very straightforward Photoshop file. So now what I want to show you is what happens when we bring the Photoshop file into After Effects. Because I think it's way faster and easier to composite and do layouts in Photoshop, I mean, for me. And getting this into After Effects, After Effects will do all the work to convert this over into our After Effects file.

So let me close this file. That's the Photoshop file. I'm going to take that Photoshop file. And now I'm going to bring this into the project panel.

Now, After Effects is going to ask me something because it understands this Photoshop file. Under my import kind, I can choose whether this comes in as footage...

Composition, or composition retain layer sizes. So if I bring this in as footage, what that means is the entire Photoshop file just comes in as one piece of art inside of After Effects. So I'll go ahead and click that as the option. So now I've brought that file in. I can see my PSD over here. Create a comp. I'll just drag this over. And now I have one piece of artwork inside of After Effects that I can start to do something with, add some animation, move this around. Now, the Photoshop file is unharmed in this. And it has all of its layers. If I hit command E...

That will say edit original, just like Illustrator and InDesign, Photoshop. So I'm back in my original Photoshop file. So let's say I want to make a change. Just for an example, I'm going to hit command I. I'll just inverse that artwork.

In Photoshop, I'm just going to simply hit file save. I'll switch back to After Effects. And that artwork is modified immediately. So After Effects doesn't see all the layers, but they're all there. We just said, treat this as one piece of footage.

Good? Okay, let's change that up.

Let's go back to After Effects. Let's delete all of this. Let's bring it in again. And this time, we're going to choose a composition.

Drag this in.

Let's come up here and choose composition.

Now, there's two composition styles. Retain layer sizes means each will come in at its own size. If I just choose composition, they'll all come in at the full canvas size. And you might want to do that if you don't want to worry about registering the layout. You just want to drop things in. So we'll choose that option first, bring this in as a composition.

We'll click Okay. And now look what we got. We got our Photoshop file...

Put into a folder. And then every layer of this is now being shown. So this is the stock image. Our background, here's our gift cards. Gift card 25.50, layer one. Every layer from Photoshop is showing up in here now. And we got a composition. It made it for us. So if I double click this, my composition has already been created. And I have all of my layers showing up down here.

So that's pretty cool. Now that retain layer sizes, what that means is if I click gift card 25, maybe I'll just hide all the other layers with the eyeball.

If I move this around, you can see the bounding box. All of the negative space has been saved in here.

So this layer, every single layer is the full size of the Photoshop file. Now, this is great if I don't want to have to worry about registering artwork so that they all line up together. I can just drop it all in there, animate stuff really quick. And then I know After Effects will keep everything lined up.

But if I don't like that, we'll do this one more time. Let's bring this in. This is the one that I'll use for this demo. Let's come in here and choose retain layer sizes. Now, the other option we have is if we would like to have editable layer styles or if we want to merge them as footage. So what this means is if I have any layer styles in Photoshop, like drop shadows, grading, overlays, anything non-destructive from the filter menu...

They will get converted to drop shadows in After Effects. Now, almost all the filters are convertible. So if I were to choose editable layer styles, what that means is I can still get the Photoshop layer, but I'll get an additional drop shadow setting on there. So if you want After Effects to take over the drop shadows and effects, you can choose that. I almost never do that because I like to just jump back over to Photoshop, finish my comps and just go back over here and do my animation work.

It's the last time we'll click that. Let's scoot over here. This all looks the same. But now if I come into the comp and select gift card 25, now the size of that is just the size of the actual artwork. So the bounding box gets saved inside of there.

Okay. Let's talk about some of the principles of creating an animation. I'm going to hide some of these for the moment.

So inside of After Effects, we have this idea of creating keyframes along a timeline and then changing the properties of those as we go across. So we'll talk about manually creating some animations here, and then we'll take a look at some presets that will get you quickly started creating some of your animations. And I would highly recommend starting with presets. Because once you apply a preset, we can go in and look at how it's put together. And then you can start to see how these pieces fit.

So the basic idea behind creating an animation, I'm going to open up gift card five. Zoom up again. So if I open up gift card five, we can see transformations. If I open transformations up, these are all of the things that have to do with this layer. So let me move this down a little bit.

So anchor point, that's the registration point. We've got our position, the scale, rotation, opacity. They're all pretty straightforward. These are all scrubby numbers. So I can scrub this. So I can come down here and scrub the position and move this side to side. I can just click and drag it and move it around. I can change the scale. We can change the scale unhooked or unlink the two. Rotation, and we can change our opacity. So the idea behind creating animations is you want to change these properties over time. So down here in my Timeline panel, not only do I see the layers, but I get a play head here that I can click and drag. So at the zero mark, this is all of the values of everything in here.

Let me fix that. That's hurting my feelings. All right. So for our scale, I'll lock this back up.

I'm going to come in here and say that I want to pay attention to the scale. So what I can do is come down and click on the stopwatch. That activates that property in After Effects and tells After Effects to pay attention to that property if I change this at any time. So once this is being paid attention to-- Let me scoot over here, maybe out to about five seconds. At five seconds, I want to scale this up, maybe back up to a 100%. So I'll just grab this and drag this back up to a 100.

After I make that change, After Effects makes a second keyframe for me automatically. I've told it, if there's anything I change on that property throughout the timeline, make that change and bring this in.

So now I can come back here, hit the play head...

And then we'll see the animation coming up.

We can combine a bunch of these. So let's add in rotation.

I'll click the rotation here. A lot of times, we work backwards when we create animations. If this is the final rotation that I want, I'll come out to my final five seconds...

Come back to rotation. I need to add another keyframe. I can just click this button here. So now both keyframes are the same, but now I can come back to this one and I can rotate this a little bit.

So maybe I want it to rotate from there...

Hit play, and now I'll get the combination of both of those different pieces.

Now, the great thing about keyframes is we can change the keyframes where they're positioned on the timeline. And this becomes incredibly powerful. So if I hit play, this is not exciting me at all. I'm sure you guys are pretty bored.

Animations, a lot of times, need to be quick, keep our attention. And so when we come down here and play this, we might decide that needs to be faster. What we can do is simply come down here. You can select keyframes. I can marquee select them. I can click on them and drag them. And I can just drag this back. So instead of five seconds, let's play this in one second. That's going to be five times faster. Hit play...

And that'll come up a lot faster for us.

And then we can use these keyframes to choreograph stuff. So let me go to gift card two.

And let's decide what we want to animate there. So I'll zoom out here a little bit just so...

I can see what's going on.

So for number two, maybe we activate the position and the scale.

Let's come out to one second. I'm going to turn on keyframes for those as well. Then I'll go backwards. Animation is almost always backwards. I'll come up here to the composition. I'll just click on this, hold the shift key, scale this down. And I'll just move it off the stage.

When we move things on the position, you'll see these little dots showing up here. This represents every dot based on the frame rate of your composition. So if you have your composition set at 30 frames per second, you'll see 30 dots for every second. It tells you exactly where that artwork is going to be across your entire timeline, which is incredibly cool. And just to make that even funner, let's come up to the pen tool. Let's come down to the convert vertex tool. So now we're doing some Illustrator stuff. Let me just grab this point...

And just drag this around, just like we would do inside of Illustrator.

Let's zoom out. Let's come back. Let's hit the space bar.

So now we've got our two items coming in.

So again, the idea behind creating animations, we are setting properties a long time.

All of this can be changed. I can marquee select across multiple layers, change the duration, and everything in here is going to be set up for us.

So this is really it. Any animations that you see are really just what happens at one keyframe and what happens at the second keyframe. When you have 30 or 40 items on the stage, it becomes a lot to look at. Everything's moving around and looking crazy. We get all kinds of layers. But if you break it down, we're basically looking at this construct throughout all of our animating work.

Okay. Good so far? All right. So to make some of this faster, if we take a look at the effects and presets, we have a bunch of options here...

That will allow us to apply a bunch of animation techniques right away. So let me open up the animation presets. There was a bunch of new presets added in 2024. And in 2025, that just came out, maybe yesterday, I think, there's even more presets. If you stop by the Adobe booth, they will show you new presets they have that can be data driven, things with pie charts, just really crazy stuff. I did not want to risk updating and breaking my presentation for today.

But they're adding even more and more presets. So let me show you what some of these do.

So that looks really cool for these. I mean, that's amazing. I can tell you guys are really stunned by that. So let's come down and take a look at the two layers we've got down here, gift cards and now available.

So right now, these are being treated like pixels. I can't select this. I can't change that text. It's just showing up as a layer down here. But After Effects completely understands Photoshop and Illustrator, by the way. I can right click on the now available, come down to create, and I can say convert this to editable text. Any of the settings set inside of Photoshop will now be converted to a live text object inside of After Effects. Click on convert to editable text. I now see a little T icon here.

I can double click this to get inside of it. And then in my properties panel...

Check this out for all you Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop people, all of the type tools in here, including optical, spacing, kerning, tracking, baseline shifts, everything that you would expect, ligatures. All that stuff is also in After Effects. So you can do all of the designee stuff inside of here, which I think is great.

Some of the new tools from other companies and stuff...

Don't have quite as many type controls. And I really miss them. So I'm really happy that all of these are in here. Okay. So we have our type here. So these are all individual characters. Now, if I come in here and take a look at the properties under here, we'll toggle this open. Here's all our transforms. And text is technically vector artwork. It's all mathematical based on the font. So if I open this up, there's a bunch of things I can do here. The source text is the actual character. So we can change that as we go. There are path options. More options. I love that. And then there's animation tools. You can come in here and activate additional properties. Add tracking, add character offsets.

These can get a little heady at first if you've never worked with any of this stuff. So this is how the presets come into play. Let's say I wanted to animate the tracking. I want to do something like a Hollywood movie where it's out really big and just tracks in. There are a bunch of presets that we can apply to our artwork. So animation presets, let's come down. Let's open up text. And then under text, we have all of these things we can do to text. And these will apply all the transforms to all the characters automatically for us. We just drop them in. So there's one for tracking. Let's come down here for tracking. And a bunch of things we can do with tracking. We can decrease it, increase it. If you're not sure what they do, just add it. If you don't like it, you can delete it.

So let's come down here. Now available is selected. Let's come down. I'm going to grab the contract. I'm going to click and drag it. And I'm going to drag it all the way down on top of the now available layer.

If I have that layer selected, you can also double click it. But one thing to be careful with is if you have a lot of layers in After Effects, when you drag an effect, make sure you apply it to the layer that you think you're going to be applying it to.

So now I can simply hit play.

And now we have all of those letters animating for us.

If you are so inclined to check out what's happening, this actually added under our text an item called Animator 1, which is the same thing if I went in here and applied tracking. You can toggle this open. There's a range selector. You can toggle this open. Again, this might look a little...

Crazy, so you don't have to learn all this just yet. But the way that this works is After Effects is finding the letters, counting out how many of them there are, counting out what the space between them is. And it's letting us simply change these. And look, it gave us two keyframes automatically. So if I want to make this happen faster, I can just grab one of the keyframes and just drag it back.

So After Effects starts doing some of the work for us. We can get in here and just really, quickly get this into place.

All right.

So at this point, let's...

Hop over and let's start taking a look at things we can start to do inside of After Effects, combine them with Photoshop, and get some motion in place. So now we all have a basic understanding. We understand the interface, this idea of keyframes. Motion can also come from video files. So what I want to do here is let's come in here and take a look at placing video inside of After Effects.

And again, I just want to give you ideas of different kinds of things you can do with our project.

So in this case, we are creating a LinkedIn ad. And the artwork that we're going to be adding is actually going to be video. So what I want to do here is I'm going to come in. I've got this LinkedIn ad. And I thought it would look really kind of cool if we have this picnic scene. So when you're scrolling through, it looks like a picnic or maybe a catering company. This is actually for a pest control company. And we put the interface of LinkedIn in here as well. Let me turn on full res. So when somebody's scrolling through, we can have, in this case, I want to have ants looking like they're crawling around and breaking the picture area. So this will make somebody just stop for a second and go, whoa. Like, nothing's supposed to go over top of the like button. I saw somebody do this. I thought that was super cool. So, of course, we're going to steal it.

So we went into Adobe Stock and looked for...

Videos that we could use for this. So inside of Adobe Stock, I found this video. So I wanted to use this one because I wanted to show you how to use keying inside of After Effects. That's going to be really key for being able to take parts of a video and make them transparent.

Then we're going to step it up a little bit and maybe use real footage so that we've got some real ants showing up here. But this one looks like something we wouldn't be able to use. I'm going to show you two techniques here for applying this content. So for the first one, if we grab the ants...

And drag them on the stage...

I'm going to hit S for scale.

Scale these down a little bit.

To get the green to go away, we're going to use an effect called keylight.

So we type in keylight. We'll find keylight 1.2 right here. I'm going to click on this. And I can drag and drop it into the composition as well. When I drop this here, I'll click on the eyedropper tool. And what I'm basically doing here is picking out the color I need to knock out of there. So I can just click on the green. That takes that out. There's a bunch of other really cool settings in here too, things like screen gain and setting the amount of color that it will take off reflective surfaces. So if you're doing Star Wars, working on Star Wars 10 or whatever and the lightsaber is not kind of coming out the right way, there's a bunch of controls you can come in here and change as well. In this particular case, on this image, that green was just one solid color the whole time from a graphic. So that came out really clean for this. So now I can come in here, I can hit play...

And now I've got my ants running around here. I can select them and maybe position them.

And I can make a clipping mask just like we do in Photoshop by coming down here to the track matte and saying I want the track matte to be the Photoshop file that's down here at the bottom. So what a track matte is, it's the exact same thing as a clipping mask in Photoshop. I'm saying, take the video and clip it into this file down here. The only difference is After Effects can clip to any layer. It doesn't have to be directly above it like we have to do inside of Photoshop, which is super cool. And you can see it here under the track matte. These switches, by the way, you can turn these on and off by right clicking in this title bar and go to columns. And these are all the types of columns you can turn on.

You can also come down here and turn these on and off down here as well.

So then what I did to make this a seamless loop, I can select this layer. I can hit command shift D, or you can go up to the layer menu and say split clip. And all that does is it turns it into kind of like Premiere, where I can change the in and out points of the ants running around.

So what I did here is I have the ants for 10 seconds. We have them running around as soon as I turn them back on.

So I have two sets of ants running around. We've got the ants at the top and the ants at the bottom.

Turn this on to fit 100.

Now we can hit play. Now we get that effect I was after. I really wanted the ants running down here.

So now with the technical aspect out of the way, now we can talk about the experience. What is the experience we're going after here? Do I really want to scare people? Or do I just want them to go, oh, how cute the little ants? We've got a little character here made in Firefly for the extermination company. So this has a certain tone to it. The ants are clearly walking in a circle. They're clearly graphics.

Has a really kind of interesting feel to it. But what if we wanted to use the real video of the ants? So in this case, what I did is I picked a part of the video where we can see just a couple of the ants moving.

And then you can see in the timeline, I just clipped this. So I just want to see a couple of seconds. So I started when there were no ants in the middle.

Let it go across, a couple of ants go through, one little ant ends it, and then it's done. And then we let the video play for a little bit...

and then the ants come back on. So now when you hit play...

We're going to see real ants from a real video. And we used overlay mask from Adobe Stock to bring these ants into the stage.

And then finally, the other thing we did here is we turned on something called time remapping. You can get to time remapping by right clicking, going up to time, and saying enable time remapping. What this does is it allows me to play the video at certain speeds. So before, we had the credit card moving, and I could move the keyframes and play the animation that After Effects was animating. But in this case, I can change how fast the video is playing. So we can move this back to maybe three seconds.

Maybe hide all these guys. And now when I play this...

They're going to play really quick.

So then you might want to test this on your phone and see if that's going to freak people out or not. If they really think there's an ant on their phone, they might throw it.

Could be kind of fun. But again, two things you can start to do now with video. Just incorporate the video into your designs, track matting, time remapping, keying, so just things that allow you to help composite all of this stuff together.

All right. Doing good so far? [Woman] Yeah. All right. We're going to keep on going. So let's take a look now at other things we can do working with video in some of our content.

So here, we're going to come into a banner that we're creating. So this is going to be another ad for social.

So we've got this background graphic here. The Photoshop file has the composition. We cut out the grill here. I put the grill on a separate layer so we can see that here. So we get a nice layered effect. We've got some live type layers here.

And then we went to Adobe Stock, and we got a stock footage of some smoke. So if I come in here and play this.

And if you search Adobe Stock, there are tons of small looping videos and video effects, black and white like this, specifically meant for compositing these things into some of your projects.

So let's come in here. I'm going to hit R. With that layer selected, that's going to bring up the rotation tool. Let's animate this around. I'm going to hold shift and hit scale as well, so we can scale that down.

So let's get this. So it's looking like it's coming out of the grill. So maybe somewhere around right there. Bring this in.

Now, another thing we can do inside of After Effects is we have the ability to add masks. Now, the way the masks work is the masks are triggered off of the exact same tool as the shape tool. So technically, we just have a shape tool. So right now, I have no layers selected. If I come up here and select the oval tool and I come into my canvas, you'll see that I have that little tiny star icon next to my cursor. This means if I click and drag to make a circle, I get a brand new shape layer in my Timeline panel.

If I delete this, I select any layer. Notice this changes into the mask tool, the exact same icon we see inside of Photoshop. Now if I click and drag, I'm creating a mask on that layer. All vector tools, but depending on what's selected when you create a shape, depends on how that shape will now start to behave.

So I have this selected. Let's go into the mask properties. If I click on mask path, and I'll hit the letter V key, I can come in here and I can vector this around.

So maybe I put this like way out here.

I'm going to come over here to the mask feather. Let's feather this about 200 pixels to make this super soft. And finally, let's change our blend mode to screen.

Let's come down here and hit play.

And now we're going to be able to composite this together.

So that's pretty cool. But you know what would be even cooler? Since the smoke would really affect the type, it'd be kind of cool if the type wobbled around with all that heat coming out of the grill.

So let's come over to our effects and presets. The next thing I want to show you guys is displacement.

So we're going to come down to displacement map.

I'm going to click displacement map. I'm going to come down and drop this on top of the loving summer text.

So let's go, we'll take a look at the effect and presets settings.

So as I mentioned, we can always see the properties for the settings here in the effect controls. So displacement map, this is being displaced based on which layer. We're going to change this to the video file. So that means depending on the pixels in the video, that's going to affect the typography in here. Let's change this to luminance. So it's being affected by how white or dark the pixels are. And I can come in here and change the numbers. So let me change this maybe to 20 or 30. You can see that affecting there.

And then, of course, the cool part is if I hit the space bar to preview this.

Yeah. How cool is that? Just completely-- And how easy is this? It's just so fast to do this. Come back. We can copy the displacement properties, paste it onto the other text down here, paste that.

Now they're both going. And then I spent, just like with the ants, I spent a little time just setting up the smoke, just making the smoke so that the end matched the beginning a little bit, just by blending two layers together. And it doesn't have to be perfect because this is just displacing the whole thing. So in the final ad, we just have something that will just continue to loop.

Okay. Let me show you a couple of other examples of what we can do with that. So in this example here.

So here's the Harpa Concert Hall in, this in Reykjavik.

So what we did here is I'm going to hit the space bar, and you can see this animated water showing up down here. That's another displacement map. So what we're doing here is running the displacement on the reflection here. But I want to show you how this file is put together. So if I come down here to the reflection or actually let's go back to Photoshop, because this is done with Photoshop comp and retain layer sizes. I'll hit command or control E.

And so what we did here is we took our original photograph and we cut out the entire reflection area as a mask. So if I hit shift and disable the layer mask, this was the original photograph.

Turn the layer mask back on. We basically just took the reflection pool in front and just masked the whole thing out.

Then we broke the artwork into individual pieces.

So we have under the bridge section, we've got the reflection piece here. I can move this around. You can see that. This is all of the concrete pieces. We've got the main base piece here.

And notice something subtle that we did here. When I move this around in Photoshop, notice that I see the construction blocks here, the cinder blocks. Concrete. There we go. The concrete blocks. And we can see negative space between the bottom of the concrete block and the building.

But the reflection is not going to show that. If we look at the original art...

The foreshortening of this is because the reflection pool is closer to the building. And based on our perspective, the light is hitting that from that perspective. If we were like there in the pool, the concrete would look like it was next to the building. But us being back here, we don't see that up here in the real world. But in the reflection, we get that foreshortening. So we took that as a cue when we come in here and add our additional artwork. So now that these pieces-- Let me turn my layer back on or the mask. So now when we have these pieces here, we just need to make sure that we match those up. If we spend that extra time, I'll get it eventually. There we go. So if we spend that extra time, I can actually make that reflection look realistic, do the same things that were in the original. But the reason that we reconstructed this is because I didn't want the waves in the reflection in the original artwork. This is already displaced. It's displaced in real life, IRL.

Did I sound cool saying IRL? All right. Cool. I didn't know if I could pull that one off. I tried something else cool, and the last one didn't work.

So if I hide that, then we can add our building up here, which is not being displaced. And then we can displace that in After Effects. So we get that really realistic look that we have down here.

All right. Now let's add some more funness here. Let's come in here. Let's go up to the layer menu. Let's choose new adjustment layer.

And one of my favorite features in here is something called light rays.

So we'll type in rays. We're going to add CC light rays.

I'm going to drop this on to the adjustment layer.

And what that's going to do is it's going to drop a point here. And this little light ray will take any pixels underneath of it and broadcast them right at you. And based on the contrast of the image, it's going to make it look like light is shining on or through this. This is the coolest feature. So here it is up in the sky. But if I start to drag this down-- Look how cool that is.

So what I want to do is I really want to enhance that sun that's shining down here. So I'm going to come down here, drag this right into here.

Let's move this over a little bit. Let's take a look at the settings here. So I'm going to come up here. We can increase and decrease the intensity. And it's actually, it's not just adding white pixels. It is mixing the light together. It is using all of the fundamental properties of light when it's doing this. That's why it's got such a realistic kind of look to it. So the warp softness is how...

Tight are all of these pieces when we move this up and down. So I'm going to keep the warp softness down a little bit.

And again, I mentioned this before, but if you don't know what the properties mean, I didn't know any of these words when I saw this, just drag stuff around and see what happens. You can't hurt it. It's non-destructive. So the radius, I can make that bigger or smaller.

It's so cool. I can change the shape from round to square. That turns on this direction piece. And now I can animate this.

How cool is that? That's amazing. So I picked something that I like there. I'm going to tone this down a little bit. Now I'm going to select that. I'm going to hit command or control D, and I'm going to duplicate that.

On the copy, I'll come down here. And instead of getting the color from the...

Footage, I'm going to turn that off. And now I can pick my own color. So I'm going to pick a really dark, a pretty dark orange color. Let's come in here. Let's put this down.

We're going to click Okay. I might bring the intensity down on that a little bit. But now I can add a little bit of that sun yellow in there, get really that reflection that's going to happen. Yeah. More real than real.

Come in here, warp softness. I might bring that down a little bit. Anyway, you get the idea. And then, of course, command or control D, you have to add-- I learned this from Bert Monroy, because I did something like this and Bert called me out. You're going to have to also add the effect into your reflection as well. So in this case, I might increase the radius here. I might change the color to something a lot more muted...

And bring the intensity down quite a bit.

But again, you always want to make sure that, you know, you're being as realistic as possible. Because if you're going to intensify the reflection in the building from the sun, you want to do it down in the water as well.

So, super fun.

All right.

And in interest of time, I will get these. Two years ago at MAX, I did on this one of Julieanne Kost's Antarctica trip. So she gave me permission to use this. So thank you, Julieanne.

So you can watch a previous video of this one. It's done exactly the same way. The foreshortening of the iceberg, the reflections, there's just so many amazing things you can start to do with displacement map. So in the first example, we warped all the text from the grill. In the second one, we had different pieces showing up here.

So let's-- We're going to skip particles. We'll come back if we have time. I prepared four hours of content for you guys, by the way, just so you know. So let's come in here, and let's take a look at...

Something else that we can do that I just think is awesome. So, of course, you're going to want to use your own videos and composite your own videos into different ads or pieces or whatever.

And when you are starting with video, you want to make sure that the camera doesn't move at all. So we're going to start with this video. We were at this restaurant. They had this amazing oven. And we asked them for permission. Can we take a picture of this? And so I tried to be really still. I'll drag this back and forth.

Right now, that's pretty straight, right? [Woman] No. No. Thank you. Whoever's super honest, no. That is not straight. So what can I do? I love that oven. I really want to make it into an animation and use it in an ad. But it just moves around too much. So here's another thing you can do. I love this feature. So here we are inside of After Effects. I drag the video in here. Let me go to fit up to 200.

So here it is, moving around. We're going to come up to the effects and presets, and we're going to add an effect called the warp stabilizer. Sounds like something out of Star Trek. So here it is, warp stabilizer. I'm going to grab this and drag and drop it right on top of the video.

So this is going to take a few seconds. If you take your full Android or iPhone 4K video of four minutes and drop this on, it's going to take a little bit. It's going through every single frame of the video, analyzing each frame, then going back and checking out how much each pixel is moving that it can detect in your image for the entire video.

So this video is not that long, maybe 11 seconds. It's not 4K. If you know you need to do this and you don't need 4K, I would highly recommend maybe making a smaller version of your video before you do this. So now, here's what happens. So I come in here.

The first thing that it does is it sets the smoothness. So smooth motion so if I was really moving a lot, this will make you less seasick. There's tools like this inside of Premiere as well to make it not so crazy if you're running down a hallway. But the other option is to come down here under smooth motion and change it to no motion.

So that'll go through again.

You'll notice that it zoomed in a little bit. If you are taking a picture of something, you don't have a tripod, and you think maybe you might want to do this, just zoom back a little bit on your video. Make sure the subject you want to stabilize is well in there. So this zoomed in to all the pixels that it could stabilize from me going like this. Maybe I had some wine that day, I'm not really sure, trying to get that video. But now check this out. Let's come down here and hit play.

Isn't that amazing? That's not even like-- Thank you. I worked hard programming this. So I really appreciate it. So now I have a piece of footage that has no motion. And then I can export this back out to Photoshop and do a couple of extra changes. So the other feature I haven't shown you yet, which is amazing and lets you go back and forth, is from After Effects. I can go up to the composition panel. I can come down to save frame as. And you can choose a file or you can choose save as Photoshop layers. If you do some cool thing inside of After Effects, add type, add layers, composite stuff together, create masks, you can go back to Photoshop and it'll build a fully transparent, layered Photoshop file that you can then pick up. So let's do that. So let's choose Photoshop layers. For now, I'll just click the desktop. So this is going to be up in handheld PSD. Click Save.

Let's go open that up.

And now inside of Photoshop, I can come in here and do things that I might need to do to this.

So what we did, we took out some of the letters. And you can use generative fill. Any of the photoshopiness, you can come in here and use.

So what we ended up doing is we created an oven still Photoshop file. And I just extended out the tiles. So I had enough negative space on the left hand side, cut a hole here in the middle so I could put the after effects stabilized...

Fire in there. And when we're done, we can come up with a full social media ad...

That's going to look great. It's super tiny. This was for an email. So it was under 500 kilobytes, which is incredibly tiny. And it just gave us something that we could use from a handheld video. And color correction, Camera Raw. That's the law. You have to use Camera Raw in every one of your images. And we ended up with this great looking ad that made everybody super happy.

So stabilizing is a really key idea for getting all this content out. How we doing on time? Oh, not too bad.

Okay, so let's take a quick look at another feature.

And again, just to remind you, I wanted to show you a bunch of features. I know I'm going fast. It's being recorded. But I want to trigger some ideas for you guys, because I wanted to pick a bunch of different things, different sort of ideas that might spark some of the projects that you might be working on.

So for this one, this is a feature called CC Sphere. And what it does is it takes artwork and it wraps it into a ball for us. So if you've ever seen a flat map...

This will allow you to take a picture of Earth, for example, and we're going to wrap this into a sphere. And everything that happens inside of there will allow us to, again, take artwork and sort of map it across a globe.

And this is the core principle behind 360 or VR photography as well. So in this example, we're going to create a ball where the artwork is mapped around the outside of the sphere. And this is really quick and easy to do. So this is an image from Adobe Stock. And by the way, this is...

14,000 pixels by 7,000 pixels. So we could print this on the side of a bus.

And you can use After Effects for print design, by the way, as long as you have enough pixels. Save this out as a Photoshop file.

It's all just pixels. Okay. So let's come into our effects and presets.

Let's do CC Sphere. We're going to click and drag, and I'm going to drop this right onto that sphere.

So now in the effects-- Let's move this over. Jump up a little bit. So here we have a bunch of different properties here. So the radius, by default, is set to 200. I can increase this. And that's going to increase this up.

I can go as high as 7,000 pixels and not lose any resolution.

I'll just go up to this high for now. And there's a bunch of other settings in here. We've got our render settings. So I can render the full shape. I can render just the outside or I can render just the inside. So imagine we were inside the Earth in a bubble. And we could only see the outside area.

Light and shading, we can change the direction of the light.

Where that's coming, we can change our demarcator, I think it's called, AMPM thing, whatever that is. Shading, you've got all kinds of cool stuff. We can add some ambient light out on the back. But the coolest part, let's open up...

The rotation.

Let's come in here. Let's grab the x rotation. We can actually rotate this...

In any direction.

Move the y axis. We can actually rotate this down a little bit if we want to see a little bit more of the northern hemisphere or maybe more of the southern hemisphere. Rotate this in a circle. Z will just rotate it around this way. And, of course, all of these properties are completely animatable. So as we drag all of these around...

We can just have just a spinning Earth that's going around.

So then you can take that same technique. And if you're working in animations, you can actually come in here and change how some of this artwork looks. So if we come in, we can look at the artwork for this, for example. And you can basically say, maybe run this through a filter. Maybe create your own Jupyter by just going into Illustrator and just drawing a bunch of lines. Put a little circle in here, make sure that the edges all match up, and then you can bring this into another project. So let's listen to Chloe as she explores the universe. [Chloe] Got it. Jupiter also has a very magnetic personality. Its magnetic field is about 12 times stronger than your planet Earth. And Jupiter is so big that you could fit more than 1,000 Earths inside. That's huge. While this may be the big-- Emilia will love the fact we outplayed her clip here.

So again, spherizing, you can reuse this for multiple things. So even something that is like 3D, like the Earth was super realistic. For this one, we just used the same Spherize, turned off all the lighting, it became a flat 2D shape. Still has that 3D effect in that cartoon, but we don't have to-- We don't have to keep the default settings that we got. We can really just be kind of creative and use this for different things.

So let's take a quick look at...

The opposite of that. So that was Spherize, where we have a sphere where we're applying the artwork to the outside.

VR is getting more and more popular...

With tools like the Meta Quest and the Vision Pro and, people working with 3D. There's 360 cameras. You can go to the Insta 360 booth, and they have these cameras that can show you some amazing things. One of the first things you'll want to do once you have a 360 image is you're going to want to change it. You're going to want to do something to it. So here we have a 360 image. And what I want to do is maybe remove the tripod down at the bottom and maybe put a logo in there. Well, one of the things with the sphere is I can't edit the flat image. If I make a change to the bottom pixels, they all get pinched up at the bottom and it doesn't look right. That's not how that would really look if that logo were on the floor when we took a full 360 picture. So in After Effects, there is, under the window menu, a panel called the VR comp editor, virtual reality comp editor. So I have that right down here in the corner.

I'm going to come down here and I'm going to click add a 2D edit.

I'm going to be asked what kind of size. I'll just keep it 1920, 16:9 aspect ratio. That's fine. This is just the sort of window. So imagine, we're going to be inside of this bubble, and that's just the size of the window that we're going to be able to look around in. So I'm going to click on add 2D edit. That's going to create a new composition for me. So if I come over here and take a look, I got all these new composites. And it's going to add them to the timeline.

So again, going back to the very beginning, if you understand and now you recognize when you see comps and the timelines, you're going to be able to see pretty quickly what's happening. And they labeled these. So this is the output and this is the VR edit. So under VR edit, I'm going to come over here and click the orbit tool, which is the same icon we saw in Project Neo. And now I can click and drag...

And I can look this is like a VR competitor. So I'm looking through an Oculus or something. So let's get rid of the tripod. So let me move this into place about right here.

Let's go to the composition. Let's choose save frame as. Let's choose Photoshop layers, desktop. I'll call this remove tripod.

We're going to click Save.

So here it is in Photoshop. So now in Photoshop, I can remove this any number of ways. I'm going to get rid of all of these extra groups, but all the layers came in. So if we had multiple layers, that would get rid of it. Just for the sake of time, I'm just going to use the spot healing brush. But generative fill will probably give me something better. So I go through here and I say, you know what? That looks great. Then maybe let's come in and let's add the logo as well. So let's come in. Let's find the track three logo, drop that in. Let's scale that down.

Let's save this. Place it. Yep. Save and close. Let's go back to After Effects.

Double click. Let's place from the desktop. We're going to place in our remove tripod.

I don't know where I put it, so let's do it this way.

Remove tripod place. Oh, it's right there. I didn't see it. I'm going to bring this in as a piece of footage. We're going to click Okay.

Drop this right in. It'll snap into place.

Then we're going to go back to the composite output.

Click on my rotation tool.

Actually, I'm sorry. We have the composite output. So see, what happened to the logo? We could never do that. The way that needs to be distorted and moved around. And so to quickly take a look at the final piece in a VR editor, we can export this out. We can bring up our viewer.

Then once the viewer comes up, I can drag this in.

And we've created this image for this company so that they could have their logo and their menu in here. So this was actually used for their Google Street Map page. So you could actually go into the store if you've ever seen Explore the Store. So now you can go in. You can click and drag. You can see the time of operation. You can see their logo, all the color correction stuff. And we made this edit by combining After Effects and Photoshop together to create artwork that's inside of that sphere as we're going across.

That's too wild.

All right. Again, I know we're popping a lot of stuff at you. But VR photography, at some point, we're all going to be asked to do this a lot. So all the tools are here to do this. And it just takes a couple of extra steps in thinking about what some of the tools are to get this to happen. And the fact that After Effects can give you a window, take a snapshot of that, send it to Photoshop, come back, and replace it in there is just completely awesome.

All right. I have one minute left. But you guys want to see one more example? [Woman] Yes. Sweet! All right. Okay. So let's take a look. I wanted to do this as a bonus. So here is an animation that we created for Russell Brown. Did you guys see the Russell Brown tent in Circus Park? So they're super cool. I wish I could take credit for all that. But we did actually build a website for that. So if you guys want to screenshot this.

This has a gallery with all of the prints that you're going to see, all those really cool UV prints that are inside of that tent. So you can take these home with you. You can look at them later. But I highly recommend going into the tent and looking at these UV prints. They are just exquisite. There's even a QR code in there for Epson that shows you how they put that process together with, with Bonny Lhotka and Connie Danes, who put some of this up together as well.

So to create this animation here in the background so this is a Firefly animation.

The interface is really so interactive. If you click in this section, this sort of blurs out. So, again, it all goes back to the experience that you're creating when you're putting some of this content together. But this is actually a 49 frame video. So it's super tiny. It's only 600 kilobytes. So it's less than half of one email animation.

We put it into the background of the page, and I just wanted to show you really quick...

Some of the techniques that we use to put this together. So here we are inside of After Effects. I'll just simply play this.

So if I zoom up on this a little bit.

Let's play this at full resolution. If you blur your eyes-- Give it a second to cache here.

So something that I thought was going to be super easy turned out...

To take a little bit of time. So if you blur your eyes, what's happening with the lights is there's roving lights. Every 4th or 5th light, it's sort of turning on and off. And so I thought, that's going to be super easy. Barely an inconvenience on that. But it actually turned out to be a little more difficult. So I want to show you, what I did here to eventually get that to work. So I'm going to go into a comp called tent lighting string.

And inside the tent lighting string, we have our tent lights.

Now, inside the tent lights, this is the base animation. So if I just simply hit play on this, I just have a light that uses light rays. The light rays are animating. And every five frames-- I'm sorry, every, what's it? Twenty frames. Every 20 frames...

It turns off for five frames and then turns back on.

Oh, no. It is 15. Every 15 frames.

So what that means is now I have to time those out. So if every light is going to blink every 10 or 15 frames, and I line them all up, one of the easiest things to do is to line all of these up. So these are all individual lights I've placed each one.

If I move this around, there's that light.

So if we come in here and play that, that one will blink in its order.

And we have 15 lights. And then what I did on the Timeline panel, let me just extend this out a little bit.

I have a work area. So you can set your work area to be anywhere within the comp. So I set this one at one second so that each of these lights could start five frames past the one before it. So here's the first set of lights. Here's the second. Here's the third. There's 15 lights, so they each have to be five frames apart. And you start to see this pattern.

And so this is what we ended up having to make to get this to work. I did not think of this on my own. I went in there and kept doing it. And the lights were blinking out of order. And I'm like, every one, two, three, four, five on. One, two, three, four, five on. Yeah. That's what I did.

But when it finally worked...

It just has such a really cool and kind of mesmerizing effect. Saved this out. We added our flag at the top, put it as the background of the web page, added our CSS code and all the geeky stuff. And that just gave us this really cool animation. All the artwork was built in Firefly, partly from my wife, who's in here somewhere as well.

And then sent it off to Russell Brown so that he could have this for his show.

Okay. I know that was a lot. So thank you very much.

[Music]

In-Person On-Demand Session

Adding Motion to Your Mix with Photoshop and After Effects - S6309

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Closed captions in English will be added in early November.

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About the Session

Join Chris Converse, designer and developer at Codify Design Studio, as he shows you how to use Photoshop and After Effects together to create attention-grabbing animations that will make your brand assets, social media, and creative portfolio stand apart from the crowd. Chris will demonstrate how to leverage and complement your Photoshop skills with After Effects to bring your vision to life, and how to combine your videos and photos into mesmerizing cinemagraphs and unique motion graphics content.

In this session, you'll learn how to:

  • Import PSD files into After Effects
  • Combine videos and photos
  • Bring new life to and expand your Photoshop assets into eye-catching motion graphics
  • Create unique animated assets for diverse placements and client needs

Technical Level: Intermediate

Category: How To

Track: Graphic Design and Illustration

Audience: Art/Creative Director, Graphic Designer, Motion Designer

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.


By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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