Animate A Photo Using Photoshop + After Effects

today we're learning how to do this technique taking a Photoshop document in to After Effects and animating the layers of it so that it has movement and dimension so let's get started we are in Photoshop right now and you're looking at the Photoshop file that I'm going to use in Adobe After Effects to animate and I want you to see how I have this file setup because it's going to be very important to the process I'm about to show you so I've created this file and I've flattened down a lot of the layers so I now have separated things out onto layers that I want to animate them on so in other words I have these front trees on one layer I have these crows split off on different layers so I can animate them have the bushes on a single layer I have the girl on a single layer I have these all well named because these names and these layers are going to translate over into Adobe After Effects and it's going to really help with the flow of animation so now that I have that file and have it saved I can come over here to After Effects I can hit command-i and I can import a file I'm gonna choose this PSD file so anyways I'm going to import this Photoshop and I'll get this dialog box now you have an option to have editable Styles and I'm gonna say no to that I'm going to merge layer styles into footage which is my usual and import kind is going to be composition hit OK and you'll notice that what we just imported is a folder with all of our layers neatly organized and also a composition and when I double click on that composition it has all of my layers set up nicely you'll notice that this composition right now is 9 seconds long so I can go here into composition settings and I can look at how long I want the duration to be and in this case I'm actually going to put 12 seconds and hit OK to notice I have 12 seconds I'm just gonna grab all of these layers and I'm gonna drag them out again you can use whatever time frame you prefer for this I'm going to navigate my time to the end so I have all these nice layers and they're ready to go but how do I animate them so they do look dimensional well the first thing I'm gonna do is select all of them and I'm going to make them into 3d layers you can do that by going right here you'll see this 3d layer icon and since I have all of my layers selected if I click into one it will convert them all to 3d layers this will be important later on because we're gonna move these around in a 3-dimensional space now I'm going to need a camera to move around in this 3-dimensional space so I'm gonna go here to layer new and create a camera I'm just gonna leave it camera 1 I'm going to choose the preset 50 millimeters I'm not going to change anything else on this but you're welcome to do so if you feel so inclined I'm gonna hit OK and you'll notice that a camera has been created in my composition now what I need to do is I need to be able to move these layers around separately in a three dimensional space and to do that I actually want two separate views so I'm gonna grab this and stretch this out and then in here I'm going to right click and create a new viewer so now I have two viewers showing me the exact same thing you'll notice up here in the top left it says active camera on both I'm actually going to go here to this drop-down and I'm going to change from active camera to custom view one when I do that you notice that it's now showing me a 3-dimensional view of my layer stacks so now that I've done that I want to separate these layers out so that we can move the camera through them and they look three-dimensional and I'm gonna do that by starting on my background layer and you can expand each of these layers go to the transform section and we need to change their position now we're going to do these for all the layers so get used to this so I'm going to go to position and you'll notice that I have several different numbers that I can change and what I want to change is this zero zero that is the Z position and that's going to move them forward or backward in the stack so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to scrub this number and see what happens so you'll notice that if I scrub this number I'm now moving this background layer back and forth if I move it too far forward it goes in front of all my other layers if I move it further back it goes further behind my other layers so I'm actually gonna go here and I'm gonna type in a number like fifteen hundred and you notice that now it's quite a ways back but the problem is over here in the camera viewing angle it now looks small and I can see around the edges of that I need to fix that I actually want to move a little further back I'm gonna put two thousand in this number and then I'm gonna go to scale right underneath that I'm just gonna click and scrub the scale until I bring this background layer back up to the correct size now you'll notice if we were looking on this right hand side you might not even realize I changed anything but when we go over here and look on this left hand viewer you can see that now the background is a significant distance away from the other layers so you can probably guess what we're going to do next we're gonna start doing this to all the layers we're gonna go to transform and we're gonna type in new positions for all of these so I might type in 1500 here for the back torches and then I'm going to need to scale that up so that it looks comparable to what it already looked like prior to me moving it there we go and you can see over here that layer is now a distance back as well although on this mist I'm gonna do something a little bit different I'm still going to take the position and I'm still gonna drag that position back but instead of just scaling it up I'm gonna click this little constrain proportions link I'm going to onion constrain and then I'm just going to scrub this first number here and I'm going to increase that number so it stretches the mist out and I'm going to create a slight animation with this mist this is going to be really easy to do so even if you're not familiar with After Effects I'm going to show you how this works first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a keyframe for my position so right here where you see position click on the stopwatch and you'll notice over here on the right you just created a keyframe now assuming you have your selection tool active which is V on the shortcut just click here and drag that layer a bit to the right so now I've drugged that layer to the right everything's still in frame now I'm gonna move my timeline forward just a bit and I'm gonna drag the layer back to the left and you'll notice automatically a new keyframe was created there for me that's great I'm gonna take that keyframe that was created and I'm going to drag it all the way to the end so that this animation takes the entire duration of the shot so you'll notice if I scrub right now I'm seeing this mist move along behind her which is really cool I like that alright let's move along and I'm going to scale everything up to where it belongs I'm gonna speed up this part so you can see what I'm doing but you don't have to listen to me jabbering on you now if you look here in our custom view you'll see that I have spread the layers out a few of them I've left on the same plane such as the crow and the girl because they should be in relatively the same space in three dimensions but for the rest of them spread them out so that the camera can move through them now before I do anything else though I want to add a little flair to this and there are some ways that I can do that just some slight animations for example I want the crow to be coming in flying in perhaps and I want this other crow to be moving just a bit so I've got a crow called armed crow you'll notice it's this crow right here and I want just a slight animation on this armed crow I'm gonna expand this then up at the top there is a puppet position pin tool I'm going to take that and I'm gonna click some locations on this crow now I want my mesh to be animated so what I can do is I can hit this keyframe on the mesh rotation refinements then I can move forward just a little bit and I'm going to click and drag this what you can see we've done here is we've created a little bit of an animation for this Chrome now I'm gonna go back here and I'm gonna put one more pin in the tail and then I'm gonna run that back through so you'll notice that it's mostly the head that's moving I want this to be really subtle so I'm gonna grab this final keyframe and I'm gonna drag it all the way to the end now if you see that there's a keyframe there and you can't do anything with it you probably need to expand something out so you'll notice that I have these puppet pins want to grab this move it all the way to the end you can select multiple keyframes by holding shift and just move them to the beginning so you'll notice I've got just a slight movement in the head of the crow and that's great that's perfect that's just what I want so we can use this pen tool to do a lot of different things let's back out and look at another crow so we've got this crow that's flying there are a couple of ways that you could animate this actually but I'm gonna take this back here I'm going to expand this flying crow and I'm going to go get my pen tool again and I'm gonna click on this crow so you'll see that I have have one pin in him right now I'm again I'm going to hit this little stopwatch I'm gonna move this crow up a little bit and then I'm gonna come forward at some point and I'm gonna move him down as if he's going to land on this branch so in my mesh I'm going to open the deform I'm gonna make sure that I'm just moving this pin all the way to the right so if I scrub this now you'll see that we have the crow flying in I'm gonna do this again to this other flying crow I'm just gonna select this I'm gonna grab and pin him I'm gonna come back to the beginning of my composition I'm gonna have him move so you'll notice he's flying upwards throughout the composition again I want to make sure that this keyframe is going all the way to the end so I'm gonna grab this and drag it all the way to the end now I'm going to add some flame to my torches and to do that I'm actually going to import some video a stock flame file so this flame file I want to be roughly in the same place as as these back torches and the front torch as well so I want a couple of different instances of this flame file well do is find the the places where I want it to be let's go and find the girl that's where one of our torches is and we're gonna drop the flame right above the girl now I do this mostly because it helps me with knowing how my layers are organized but you could really have this flame be anywhere it's just I find it neater and not as messy if I can keep them somewhat organized so I'm just clicking and I'm dragging this flame file over here where my torch is at I'm gonna go here to the layer mode and I'm going to set it to screen if you're used to Photoshop this is very similar to what you would do in Photoshop I'm just gonna place it there now if I scrub my timeline I can see that's looking good all right now I'm going to want a couple of more instances of this flame file so I'm going to hit command C and command V and copy it and then I'm going to move it around so I'm gonna move this over to this other one and I'll show you some ways that you can create some variation I mean it had this on here there we go now we have a rotational tool up here that I can also use to just tilt it a bit that's going to be helpful to give it some differentiation but one of the main things I can do let's see this right now you see these two torches are going in unison and that just looks too fake it looks like we just copied and pasted a flame which we did but we don't want it to look that way so what I'm gonna do is go down here to that second flame I'm just gonna click and drag the layer to the left a little and what that's going to do is it's going to move the video along so it starts at a different point than the other flame now if I scrub them you'll notice that they're not going at the exact same now they are the same video file still but they're starting at different points which gives the illusion of them being different flames so I'm going to grab this flame and I'm going to copy and paste it again I'm gonna bring it over and put it on this torch here and again I'm gonna grab this layer and I'm just going to pull it a little bit to the left so it starts at a different time so it doesn't look as similar and I'm gonna rotate it again and move it so that it fits over this torch better we have one more torch in the back there so I'm gonna put it on this torch here and then I'm gonna drag it slightly to the left so that it starts at a different point again now we need some movement in the scene and since we have our positioning all set up the easy way to do this is just to move our camera so let's go to our camera and to the transform and you'll see that we have a position on our camera just like we have on our layers and we can move this camera along so I can go to the beginning of my composition I can click the little keyframe icon on the position of the camera then I can move forward and I can move the position of the camera I'm gonna move the camera in just a bit now let's see how that looks you'll notice that as I move in the layers are moving independently and there's a dimensional appearance now you're also going to notice a few problems that we have the flames are not moving correctly and you know the foreground isn't really moving as much as I would like so I'm gonna make some adjustments here let's go to these front trees and let's bring them even closer to the camera we can do that by dragging the position of these trees even closer and then scaling them down so that they fit back into the frame as they should what about the flames though something that's wrong with the flames all right well remember we have these back torches and we have the front torch and these are on different planes so let's figure out which torch which flame is the front that's the front so let's name that front flame and then we've got these three back torches that all need to be on the same plane I'm going to select all three of them right click and I'm going to choose pre-compose and I'm gonna call this composition back flame now when you do this you're probably going to have to change the mode back to screen again that's alright everything's still in the right position now these back flames are going with the back torches and I need to know what is the position of the back torches they're at 1500 that means the back flame should also be at 1500 on the z axis so what I can do is I can create a 3d layer for that flame I can go to my position and type 1500 now of course it's gonna scale our flames down and we're gonna have to scale them back up to get them in the right position so you have to scale them back up and get them back over those torches but there we go now let's scrub again and see how that's working now those back flames are moving fine and that front flame needs to be adjusted that front flame should be on the same z-axis and let's just make sure that front torch is on zero - oh no that one's on 3/14 so let's go to this front flame and type in first we'll convert it to a 3d layer and then we'll type in 314 on the position and if I want to be really precise with my scaling I can go to the front torch and see what was the scaling on that it was 111 and then I can match that on the front flame so I go here to scale and just type 1 1 1 Enter and then move it where it needs to be all right let's try this now look at that the flame is following the torch perfectly as it moves let's finish off our camera movement so our camera position movement ends too soon you'll notice if I scrub our keyframe ends right there I don't want that so let's drag that all the way to the end of our composition let's render this out and see how this looks so here we have the render and it's good I like it I feel like though a bit more could be done for one thing I feel like the animation could be a little more rapid and interesting and also I kind of want to add a bit of mist to the front of the image I'm going to go ahead and create a little more separation still even between all these layers so I'm going to take my background layer I'm gonna move it back even further and scale it up again the reason I'm doing this is just to give some added motion here the more separated the layers are the easier it is for the camera to move between these layers but now I'd also thought of adding some additional mist so I think what I'm gonna do is grab my mist layer I'm gonna hit copy and paste that mist layer so I have a second miss layer now I'm gonna drag it up over top of where the girl is now when I do that it's not going to make any change here because the z-axis isn't actually allowing this to be shown above the girl so I need to go into my positioning and you'll notice that as I drag this you can see it right there in my custom view I can drag it until it's in front of the girl now it's covering the girl a little more than I would prefer so I'm actually going to click it I'm gonna lower this miss layer down to where it's just sort of towards the bottom of the screen so if I click and drag through this what you're going to see though is that that mist is moving upward because of the keyframes we'd created earlier so I'm going to click this keyframe and remove all my positioning keyframes what this does is delete all the previous keyframes and then we're going to click it again so I can create some new ones I'm gonna drag like I did previously to the right and then I'm gonna move forward a little bit and we're gonna drag it to the left and then I'm gonna take that keyframe to the end of my composition all right let's make another render with these changes that we've created so here we go here is the render that we just created and I liked it a lot better with the mist in the foreground it just gives it more depth and texture and also you can see the slight movements of the birds and yeah everything just seems to have worked together well so I think we're done here of course your image is gonna look different than mine just depending on your Photoshop file and what layers you are using but hopefully this walkthrough gives you an idea of how you can use your layers if you have any questions please let me know and I would love to see how you use this effect please show me your work tagged me or send me a message I'd love to see your ideas and your comments and if this was helpful for you please subscribe you can find me on instagram at joseph brewster and on facebook you can find joseph brewster photography love to hear from you questions comments criticisms random things and until next time go create and have fun

Channel: Joseph Brewster

Views: 19,524

Keywords: Photoshop, animate, photo, still photo, layers, after effects, adobe, cinemagraph, platograph, plotograph, animation, photography, retouching, photomanipulation

Id: rt3p_UudgSs

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 04 2018