From the course: After Effects CS5 Essential Training

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Creating and using lens flares

Creating and using lens flares

One really common visual element that you see all over the place - it's really trendy, it actually was trending a long time ago, and it wasn't in trend, but now it's coming back in style again - is something called a Lens Flare. Let me show you what this looks like, and then we'll talk about it. My layers are pretty full right here, so instead of having a blank area in the Timeline - which is what I usually have - I was just going to go to like a blank spot to right-click, like right here. This works, right to the left of the layers name and icons. I'll just right-click here to get the pop-up menu, or we could say New > Solid there. I'm going to Make Comp Size, and I'm going to click and make sure the Color is black. You can tell that's pure black if the RGB values are 0, 0, 0. So, I'm going to go ahead and click OK and OK. I'm going to apply the Lens Flare effect from the Effects & Presets panel to this Black Solid layer. This, my friends, is a Lens Flare. You can see, basically…

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