Fix Photoshop layers - After Effects Tutorial

- [Evanston] Hey everyone. Evanston here with another After Effects weekly tip, and in this video, I'll show you how to coop with some of the limitations when working with multilayered Photoshop files. That has shapes and layer styles. To illustrate it, we'll work with this 404 malfunction slide I've prepared, here inside Photoshop. Actually the main illustration was made by my brother Yuval. And I took it from there and did some graphics elements. We'll use this design in future movies as well, to learn other techniques. But before doing that, we'll need to make sure that we're getting everything that we need when we import this into after effects. So, I want you to pay attention to those two main titles I've named Oopsy Daisy Multiple fx, and Oopsy Daisy Single fx. I'm going to start with this one let's select it. And then I'm going to select the path selection tool, the break arrow. And I'm going to mark here around those letters. So you can see that those are basically shapes. Meaning that I've started the process by using a regular font and then I went to the type options over here and selected this command, convert to shape. In order to make sure that if I'm going to move this document between other after effects users. They don't necessarily need to have this font in order to scale this layer to any size they wish. And just in order to show you what I mean, I'm going to go to the Edit menu and choose the Free Transform path which will allow me to hold down shift and scale this to any size I like. However, I don't want to do this. So I'm just going to cancel out of the last operation. Actually, I'm not going to approve it. And I'm also going to double click on this gray area in order to open up the Layer Style dialogue. So in the recent versions of Photoshop, you can apply more than one Layer Styles. Depending, of course, on the kind. So for example, I have here two strokes and two drop shadows. You can also add more than one gradient overlay, as well as Color Overlay and inner shadow. So anywhere you can see those classes, basically you can add additional information. So in this case, we have six pixel stroke. And this is this white stroke that we're seeing over here, it is placed outside the boundaries of the shape. And underneath we have yet another stroke. This time, the size is three pixels, the color is black, and you can obviously see it over here below. When it comes to the drop shadow. We have these big red drop shadow that creates the illusion of depth of 3D. And then underneath we have another drop shadow this time a black one with an opacity of 70% and I've also modified the distance spread and size, In order to create some sort of a softness. I'm going to click okay in order to close these dialogue, and then I'm going to hide the visibility for this layer. And you can see that underneath one floor below, we have a simplified version of the same title, these time with single effects or single player styles. So I'm going to double click on it just so you can see that we have only one stroke in this case, a black one, three pixels, same things and a drop shadow only the red one. So basically what I did is I removed the extra stroke and drop shadow and you'll see why in a moment. So this is the prep steps inside Photoshop. Now I'm going to switch to After Effects and let's import this and see what happens. So here inside After Effects, I'm going to double click an empty portion of the Project panel, in order to invoke the import dialogue. I'm going to select the same file that we just saw inside Photoshop and click open. In this dialogue I'm going to choose composition as my import kind. I'm actually going to choose composition retain layer sizes, which is going to crop each one of the individual layers to the minimum amount of pixels we need. This will make the animation much more easy and fluid here. I also want to make sure that editable Layer Styles is enabled. This is going to allow me to access those layer effects or layer styles that we've just saw inside Photoshop. I'm going to click okay in order to approve my selections and then double click in order to investigate what I came up with. And you can see that we are getting everything that we had inside Photoshop. Well almost everything, we need to modify it since we are missing the line of the I here. But we also getting these guides that are traveling from the Photoshop documents here inside After Effects. Now those guides are here because I've used inside Photoshop one of the video presets in order to design this document. However, there are redundant because we have them over here in the title action safe. And just in order to avoid confusion in the future and clean up this screen, I'm going to go to the View Options over here and clear the guides from the document. This way I can always call those title action safe guides from the After Effects menu over here. Now let's deal with the missing part of the eye. So I'm going to select these title and for the moment I'm going to switch off the visibility for the single effects title. And I'm going to open it up. You can see that we are getting access to all the masks that was just so inside Photoshop. I'm going to hold down the alt or option key, scroll with my mouse in order to get a closer view to this layer. And the reason that I'm doing it, is because each one of the masks inside After Effects by default get its own color. So these should help me to identify if I'm going to scroll down the problematic one. And in this case, I suspect that this is mask number 14. And for some reason After Effects interpret it as a subtract mask, and this is why we are not seeing the result, or actually, we're not seeing the pixels underneath. And so I'm just going to switch it back to the Add mode and everything comes back to view. Now let's scroll up and close or actually fold up the masks. Now you can see that we also got a Layer Styles option but if going to treat it down, we can see that we don't have access to anything, basically just those blending options, which can be quite useful if you want to play with them. For example, if I'm going to open up the advanced blending and change the field opacity, I can actually switch off some of the properties and only leave myself with the effect. But this is not what I want in this case. So I'm just going to bring it back to 100%. And so you need to be aware that if you are using multiple layer styles in Photoshop, you're not going to get access to those layer styles here inside after effects. I'm going to zoom back and I'm going to show you another limitation. And for that I'm going to select the whole layer and note that my anchor point is here in the middle of the screen. Actually I want to change it to the middle of this layer. An easy way to do so is hold down the control on PC Command on the Mac and double click on the pan behind in parentheses anchor point tool and this is going to move the anchor point to the middle of these layer. I'm also going to solo it in place and press S in order to isolate the scale and let's enlarge it to some ridiculous value like 600%. Just in order to illustrate that we are working with a vector based layer. We also have access to all the masks but for some reason due to an after effects limitations. We can't really scale it to any size we want, it's going to get pixelated. As you can see over here, we also lose the access to the continuously restoration option that after effects offer us when we were working with masks or vector layers. And once again, this is a limitation when you bring shape layers that was created inside Photoshop into After Effects. So here is a walk around and we are going to kill two birds with one stone. So I'm going to switch between those two titles. I'm going to solo the single FX data and since we are already with the pan behind tool selected, I'm going to hold down command here on the Mac, control on the PC and double click. Just in order to save myself a step in the future. And this will reset the anchor point to the middle of this layer and then I'm going to fall down these triangle and under the layer styles, we do have access to both of them. And this is because we are using only single layer styles inside Photoshop. So as long as you are not going to add more than one layer style, and by the way, you can access them directly from the Layer menu over here under layer styles. Here is the least of all the options that you can import from Photoshop. So as long as you're just using one instance of each one of them, then you can happily bring them over here and also edit the values that will come from your Photoshop design. However, if I'm going to once again press S and scale this title to once again 600%, we can see that the problem still persist. So this is not converted to a mask or a vector layer. And if you want to maintain the vector quality, what you need to do is right click on this layer here in the After Effects timeline and then from the reveal options, choose reveal layer source in project. If you are using an earlier version of After Effects, you will find this command outside of this menu. Meaning just when you are going to right click on it. In any case, I'm going to select these columns and you can see that from the After Effects perspective, this is just a plain solid. But it is still connected to the Photoshop document. So what we need to do in order to gain all the vector qualities here in the After Effects side is right click on these layer once it is selected and from the Replace footage, ask it to replace it with a solid. I'm going to use these eyedropper and sample the same yellow color that I have from the original design and click OK. Once I make this change, nothing is going to change on screen beside the fact that I do need to open up the masks for this layer as well. Scroll down and change the same mask that I've modified before. In this case, mask number 14 to the edge mode. This is going to bring back the line of the eye. But Now note that I can get access to this switch that continuously rasterize switch. The moment that I'm going to click on it, After Effects is going to treat those vectors those masks and render a clean result of these title. Just so we'll see it in context. I'm going to switch off the visibility for the other layers, maybe also hide the biohazard logo and the panic guy. And I want to make sure that you are aware that those are parametric options. So if you scale the layer, you need to modify the settings of the layer styles in order to match the original design. But luckily, we can open up the layer styles and under the stroke for example, I can change the size let's go with 10 pixels. And I'm also going to do the same number for the drop shadow. So let's set the distance to 10, and also the size to 10. And of course, you can modify to test and also move it, maybe even attach more. And now another gotcha here is animation. If you want to animate the layer, and once again, I'm going to press S, in order to get access back to the scale properties. You will need to animate these values, because if I'm going to scale it down, those values are parametric and they are going to persist. So the line wait that we've just modified that we've just changed is now going to create a completely different look. Now if you're thinking that pre compose or the transform effect are going to help you, I'm sorry to inform you that this is not the case. Also if you're going to remove the layer styles and add Native After Effects effects such as the stroke or drop shadow effects, those effects are not going to work either. So if you need to animate those Photoshop layers keeping all the information. My recommendation is to scale the title back in Photoshop and then bring it back to After Effects as a pixel based layer. And in order to show you this workflow, I'm going to once again select the main title over here. And then I'm going to go to the Edit menu and choose Edit original. Which is going to open it back inside Photoshop then I'm going to select the title that I want to scale. Press Command or Control T, in order to get to the Free Transform past tool. And then I'm going to scale it to these value, something like this approve my selection. Once again, I may need to go back to these options and modify the stroke width. But for now I'm just going to leave it like that. I'm going to save on top of the original, switch back to After Effects. And my recommendation in this case is not to replace the layer. Just turn it off, go back to the project planner, double click in order to import once again the same document. And in this case, we just want to import it as a footage and I'm going to select the specific layer that I'm after. So in my case, the Oopsy Daisy Multiple fx layer. You can either marriage the layers into the footage or ignore layer stars. As we saw before, this is not going to change anything. I'm going to make sure that the footage dimensions are set to the layer size, click OK. And then bring it back to my composition. And then if I'm going to press S I can scale it up and down according to what I need. And the appearance is going to look exactly the same. So a little bit more work, but now you know the limitations as well as how to overcome them. And this is for this one. Thanks for watching. I hope you learn something new and I'll see you again next time.