From the course: After Effects Guru: Advanced Photoshop Integration

What you’ll learn in this course

- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington. And welcome to this course where we'll be exploring advanced integration between Photoshop and After Effects. These are two of my favorite applications. And my goal is to walk you through many different creative ways that you can use Adobe Photoshop to either repair assets or build new assets for use inside of After Effects. This will include a wide range of topics. We're going to take at preparing Photoshop files so they're ready to transfer. This will include getting files properly named and using some of the organization and alignment tools inside of Photoshop so your assets are really ready to animate. Then, we'll talk about working with raw files. What can you do with raw images to make sure that they're properly developed and ready to use inside of After Effects? Now, you can bring raw files directly into After Effects, but it's going to be a bit of a hit on the overall performance. So I'll show you some strategies on how to preserve a raw file but still get it optimized for its use inside of animation tools like After Effects or Premiere Pro. We'll also take a look at advanced typographic controls, how you can use things like Photoshop's ability to use additional characters, advanced options for kerning, tracking, and leading, as well as things like a spellchecker just to make sure that your type is completely ready. We'll explore the use of layer styles, which is a great technology built into Photoshop that can be used to stylize stills or different graphic layers, adding things like bevels, textured overlays, and glows. I'll show you how to optimize things as well as how those hand off when you bring them into After Effects. We'll then take a high-level look at fixing lens issues, things like distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting, all the different options that you can use inside of Photoshop. Now, some of these adjustments are inside of After Effects as well, but Photoshop has advanced controls. And we'll take a look at how those can be used to remove things such as distortion that can make tasks like tracking or compositing more difficult. I'll then show you a little-used technique called vanishing point. It allows you to draw perspective planes within an image. And normally it's used for things like perspective-based cloning. But thanks to a hidden menu, you can actually export 3D objects or environments out of Photoshop into After Effects, which can be quite useful for parallax-type movements or down-and-dirty virtual sets. We'll also explore focus effects to get images ready for backdrops or keying backgrounds. This is going to be quite useful, as Photoshop offers many different blurring techniques. And you can actually save out a depth map, which will allow you to animate those blurs inside of After Effects. And I'll take you through some of the Content Aware tools, which allow you to reshape a photo or remove objects. This is quite useful for background plates, set extension, or just recomposing assets for your motion graphics project. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's jump in.

Contents