5 Compositing Tricks in After Effects

[Music] hey hello welcome to this new tutorial by promotion and today we are going to take a look at five steps of compositing in after effects that you need to know and in the end of this tutorial i will also announce the winners of the free licenses for easy bounce pro as well as newton from the last video so simply skip to the end or stick with me if you want to learn something along the way but before we jump into that i have to tell you two important things first if you want to subscribe you can but you need to be aware that with a subscription also comes great responsibility so only consider subscribing if you can really handle it and second this video would not be possible without the help of envato elements so no worries this is not a commercial video i simply use assets from them in this video so you can easily follow along and if you wish you can take the same ones so to not bother you with too much information during the tutorial you will always hear this sound when i use one of their elements and i personally use envato elements for a few years now mainly for two reasons first they are time saver and second for me as a motion graphics designer as well as a visual effects artist i love that they have so much to offer indeed more than 55 million assets such as videos music templates or for example 3d assets so that means you cannot only download pre-keyed assets but decide which perspective and angle you want to have and that will come in super handy later on and as a graphics designer i'm also super happy that they also have fonts or photoshop actions and just for you i made a deal with them so you get a 70 off and the link is in the video description and now you have the best option with the most variety and also the cheapest one [Applause] hey and your license is still count even after your subscription has ended so enough of the talking let's find our way through five different compositing tasks and we will have a look at each of them separately for the least amount of frustration but hey what does compositing actually mean compositing is the process or technique of combining visual elements from separate sources into single images often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene today most though not all compositing is achieved through digital image manipulation okay got it so the first step of compositing is something you really should do in the beginning of each shot finding the right perspective and this is super important to start with as so many following compositing steps will heavily rely on this one so let's quickly find the horizon in this image by drawing vanishing points wherever we see a straight line for that i use a free tool called pd perspective guide and i will also post a link in the description in the tool i click on setup guide and i simply draw two straight lines then click on draw guide and it will create vanishing points as well as the horizon line for me and automatically set this up as a guide layer perfect so you could also draw the lines by hand but believe me if you do this professionally time saving is super super important and here's a really cool tip if you see straight onto something there will be the horizon and if the camera is also perfect straight the horizon should be in the exact middle of your image but what does that tell us about the camera so if your horizon is above the middle you can also know that the camera was tilted down and if the horizon is slower you know that the camera was tilted upwards hey but doesn't the horizon also go down when the camera goes up no here's a super straight film background horizon in the middle the camera height does not change that at all even at a few hundred meters high the horizon stays in the middle think about this if you shoot straight from the moon onto the earth the horizon is still in the middle even if the camera is 348 000 kilometers high so how is that of any help well at first if you know if the camera was straight or tilted up or down you can take that into consideration when you're going to shoot matching footage and if you set the anchor point to your horizon you can now scale your asset and the perspective will always match hey and a fun trick if you set the anchor point to the bottom of your asset and now scale it up or down you can drink or make yourself look like a giant perspective check so next up is matching the black levels and therefore let's start in black and white so we do not have to deal with any color for our example and here's our example hey for me two zebras are not enough so let's add another one and of course they should match perfect because they are black and white and the image is black and white anyways nope when i combine the two you see that we still have to work on the black levels both have a different darkest and brightest point and also the midpoint between the two seems to be different so the so-called gamma is off and if the footage would be colored i would simply add an adjustment layer with the black and white effect to it because it makes sense to isolate the part you want to work on to not get distracted by anything um where was i okay now let's think about it we are now not dealing with rgb values so we are not interested in those and also saturation and you are not interesting for us at all we only want to concentrate on brightness because that is the only info that is in the image at the moment white is 100 bright and black has zero percent brightness so let's find out how much brightness the darkest and brightest spot in the image has so to find the darkest spot you can simply bring up the exposure and have a look what will stay in the image the longest in this case this is the back stripes of the zebra here but how bright is it here's an easy trick search for your info window and if it's not there you can go to window info and here you see your rgb values but if you click over here you can also get the hue saturation and brightness info and as i told you before u and saturation always stay on zero but let's hover over the darkest parts and you see that it does not go beneath 25 so let's just note that somewhere and we do the same with the brightest part and you see that it does not go over 80 or maybe 82 so let's also note that now we can go over to the effects and presets and search for the levels effect and drag and drop it onto the zebra we want to add because we want to bring the black and white output to the same numbers we have just written down wait there's no percentage here it's just numbers and there's also no setting to change it well there actually is just click here on those three stripes next to the info and now you can choose percent and this will also change it within the levels effect so now let's just type in the values we've written down and our black and white points match but hey why does our zebra still look a little bit brighter strange well this is because the distribution of all colors between our defined white and black point is still a little different and therefore we can use the middle slider the gamma slider to make it overall darker but without changing anything to the black and white values and we can set this task to complete it and maybe also turn back on the color so next up is the depth and here two things are important objects change their black levels the further away they are so here's a shot with a lot of depth in it and i have already color corrected and applied the perfect black levels to our asset in the frontier so let's duplicate it two times positive once in the mid ground and once in the background so now the further away the acid is the more it should blend into the shot as there will be more and more atmosphere therefore the asset has less contrast and we can achieve that also with our levels so let's bring out the levels effect once again to the mid and background and we get rid of some of the blacks here and it already looks way better integrated and for the background we even go more extreme and voila that actually looks convincing but hey that was a super fast trick so let's add one more depth trick depth of field because depending on what your camera is focused on the other parts of the image will be out of focus so normally that will be the background and i have seen it too often that one just blurs the image thinking that blurring is the same as depth of field so what i'll do with this image is i add some depth of field to one side and some blur to the other side and if you do not see the difference please write me a comment because we seriously need to talk about an appointment at your eye doctor and also you will not get any bokeh effects if you are not using a depth of field effect such as for example the camera lens blur but it does not stop here an object does not have a specific amount of depth of field that is something that also has a gradient to it so what you can do is to create a layer with a gradient ramp and simply adjust it in such a way that everything that is close is white and everything that is further away gets darker this is also called a depth matte or depth path and now you can select that layer as your blur map and adjust the focus distance and the aperture to your liking or to the asset you want to place and in the effect you even have control to create a focus pull perfect depth is done so up next comes a tricky part merging foreground and background so that means if your element would really sit there how would the background affect your foreground so let's take a look at the overall colors if i'm standing in a completely red room for example the red color would spill onto me the same with green color in front of a green screen but the same happens with each background because of two reasons first is the actual color spill so let's bring this element into this scene and it already looks pretty promising but we want to blend the overall color of the background with the color of our asset so how do we get an average color of the background well we can simply duplicate it and blur it a lot no no really a lot so that you cannot see what has been there but only colors perfect now we want to use our asset to cut it out and to do so we use the set matte effect and choose our asset as take matte from layer and we end up with the acid colored in the average color of our background so almost there now we can simply go to the blending modes because remember we only want the color so we go to color and as a final step we can now play with the opacity and blend more or less color of the background into our foreground but there's a second setting that changes the color and this is the color temperature for example on a daytime shot you look warmer and in a night shot you look cooler but that is also the case in different lighting situations so to combine two different ones like they ignite in this example you can use the lumetri color effect go to base correction and here you will find the temperature slider merging done and our shot is also done well kind of and the last part is the best and most satisfying we have created everything how it would look like in the real world now we need to create everything that the camera would do to our image so it really looks like a filmed element so let's pretend the shot we have set up finds its way through a camera lens so at first you can add some small imperfections to your lens by adding a lens texture for example maybe some dirt and just for you to see better i will overdo it a little bit here and there hey and your lens normally also darkens down the edges of your image which is called vignetting so we also add a vignette effect and if you have a cheap lens it will also distort the edges slightly which we can fake with an optics compensation effect again a little bit over the top in my example so when the light goes through our lens it bounces through all the glass and creates reflections within the glass also known as lens flares or light streaks but hey also if you see those blue stripes all over feature films like star wars and so on they only happen on super expensive lenses with a special characteristic called anamorphic lens so just take that into consideration if you want to make it look cool but still physically correct also those nice black bars on top and bottom of your image are there because of the anamorphic lens because the lens films everything a bit stretched so when we watch it later on the lens flares are squeezed so they look like stripes and we also crop bottom and top of the image and we can fake that with the crop effect so a standard would be 10 but honestly there are thousands of different formats to choose from but we still have more crazy stuff that happens in your camera for example a chromatic aberration which is this strange color shift you see in the edges of your image and they simply happen because our lenses have a weak spot and this is the edges so as they are round they can focus the different values meaning rgb of the light pretty good at the center of an image but as we go further into the edges those values drift apart which causes this effect and i personally use chromatic aberration even in shots that are not filmed with a lens as an artistic choice for example in most of my motion graphics and there are many ways to create this effect and today i'm using a free plugin for that called quick chromatic aberration and i will put the link in the video description so once our shot or whether the light hits the camera sensor depending on your settings you will get more or less grain and you can simply apply that with the add grain effect just always think about what would look realistic on a day shot around afternoon you would normally have your iso settings in your camera pretty low and therefore basically no grain in the image but on a night shot you would definitely see it as this shows up when you digitally increase the sensitivity of your sensor and for all the effects i would recommend to really use them in a very subtle way because they will add up touristic look and hey those are my five compositing steps you need to know so did i miss something was there something completely new to you so just let me know in the comments and speaking of comments i went through all the comments i got on my real world physics and after effects tutorial to find the winners for the free plug-in giveaway so let's start with the winners of easy bounds pro congratulations to petrie greenheimer smoz and john p martin so have fun bouncing around and here are the winners of a free license of newton 3. congratulations go to klinkly krikri machi man and adam myers so i'm really curious what you will come up with when you use this physics simulation tool in your work here and hey that's it for today i really hope you learned something and will think about my five tips and tricks the next time you are in after effects and for now i wish you a lot of fun compositing in after effects [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: flomotion

Views: 10,591

Keywords: aftereffects, flomotion, tutorial, motion, graphics, compositing, trick, tricks, tip, green screen, blue screen, keying, ufo, alien, grain, chromatic aberration, depth of field, camera lens blur, lens flare, anamorphic, optical flare, texture, light wrap, optics compensation, bb8, star wars, envato elements, explosion, 3d, perspecive, win, depth matte, lumetri color, lumetri, temperature, day for night, animation, x files, after effects, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, visual effects

Id: mVjGjlR3IWo

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021