Welcome

- Hi, my name is Ian Robinson, and welcome to AE guru, working with Photoshop files. The marriage between Photoshop and After Effects is a very tight integrated workflow. And if you get comfortable with the little gotchas that happen as you move data back and forth between the two applications, I think you'll see that it's something that will definitely help speed up your day-to-day workflow. In this video, we're going to focus on how to actually manipulate data inside of Photoshop. And we'll start with some of the basics, like isolating still elements for animation.

Then we'll actually go on to how to optimize the files for After Effects. Because not everything is going to translate the exact same way it works inside of Photoshop. Sometimes that's actually a really good thing. Then we'll move into some more animation techniques. Once we actually get those Photoshop files inside of After Effects, how are we going to move them around? How are we going to create some interesting animation? Well one of the things we'll look at is how to create depth mats. We can use a black and white gradient to actually create a rack focus throughout a flat image and make it look like it was actually shot that way originally.

Now of course Photoshop has a bunch of different tools you can use to fix video. So we're definitely going to look at how to fix common issues with video like lens distortion, or how to sharpen up your image. And finally, we'll look at one of the most modular workflows that you can actually work with. And that's called data sets. Data sets are a very modular workflow that actually give you the ability to create multiple versions of the same file. Rather than having to focus on the nitty gritty of creating each individual version, you can focus on the overarching animation style and then modularly apply that animation to all the different versions.

It's really helpful when you're creating repetitive elements like lower thirds. So as you can see, this is going to be chock full of all kinds of tools and techniques that deal with Photoshop and After Effects. So, let's get started.