From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects

Layer styles

From the course: Learning Cinema 4D Lite for After Effects

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Layer styles

Now of course you can use all the effects you want on your Foreground layer to color correct them. There's loads of effects in After Effects that you can use, and also third party effects such as Sapphire effects and all the Red Giant effects. So they can all be used to do color correction and other looks. But I'd like to concentrate on the built in features for my tutorials so that you don't need any extra software. So, what I'm going to do is show you how you can actually use a layer style to create like a light ramp effect, to make the footage kind of blend in with the background a little bit better. Most people just think of layer styles as for text, but you can use them for other things as well. So, we're in chapter 13 CU04.AEP, and I have my main Robots layer selected. And we're going to Layer > Layer Styles > Inner Shadow, and you'll notice what Inner Shadow does. It casts a shadow inside the image. And if I solo that and just switch on the transparency grid, you can see that, and if I switch it on and off. It's basically just applying a shadow to the edge. If I open up the settings, I can do things like adjust the size of it, so it spreads further over the image, and I can change the angle. Now, at the moment, it's creating a dark shadow. But I can switch on the background again. And some poor color from the background. So, I might think, okay, I want it to look as if that orange color is being transmitted onto the background. And if I choose something like Linear Dodge, you'll notice it now shines that color onto the edge of my character. Now, at the moment, that's a little bit too strong. We could probably use Screen Mode instead. Maybe not strong enough. Okay. We're going to stick with Linear Dodge, but I'm going to bring the opacity down. Okay? So about that much. I'm also going to change the angle. Now, you can't really see the angle that much from the sizes up a high value. So best to bring that down and adjust the angle, so that the light is shining. I want it to look as if the light is shining on the back. We have already light here. So, I want a little bit of light coming from the projected screen, and make it look as if it's shining on the back of the text there and character. So, I've got a value of 32, that's going to do for me. And now I can increase the size of it. You've also got a distance value as well which you can adjust. But you have to be a little bit careful with the distance value, because it can kind of just overwhelm that a little bit. So, increase distance a little bit and size a little bit. You can see, if I bring the size down, you can see what the distance is doing. Notice how it's starting to spill over the edges and look a bit weird. So, probably not best to adjust the distance too much, and just adjust the size to make it look as if we've got a little bit of light shining on the edge. Now you can toggle it on and off, see how it looks. If you think it's over the top, we could just bring the size down a little bit. And I'm going to add some noise to it as well, that kind of helps blend it in a little bit. And what else should we do? Just bring it down to probably about 25%. So, it just helps to pull it in with the background. If you just add a tiny little bit of a highlight there on the edges of the text to make it look as if the screen In the background is emitting light onto the edges of our characters and our text.

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