- Hello everyone, this is Evan Abrams, and in this tutorial, we're gonna animate a portrait using After Effects and Photoshop. The first steps require us to cut up an image, and while we can cut things up with scathing remarks, I prefer to actually use Photoshop rather than After Effects to make this stuff happen. There are a lot more specific and nuanced photo manipulation tools that will help us not only cut out and isolate the parts of an image that we want to animate, but also fill in behind them, so it seems natural that an arm is moving, or that a scarf is blowing
around in the background because we can use a lot
of cloning and healing and content aware fill tools that are native to Photoshop. Hopefully I can cover these techniques broadly enough that you can use them to apply to whatever kind of portrait you are trying to animate. Let's open up After Effects and Photoshop and get into it. (upbeat jazz) Now we're talking about skills that are outside of After Effects, we're gonna be talking about Photoshop, photo manipulation, and
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premium Skillshare membership and explore your creativity. All right, so we've got our image open, we're in Photoshop. And before we jump into
the technical things, we should plan first. I cannot overstate how
important planning is. We can identify kind of the challenges we're gonna face, what we want to achieve here. Here's some things to look out for. Look for the elements that you want to separate. So I know that I wanna
separate this frame, and I wanna make this guy, this whole guy move independent of the background. So, I know I'm gonna need
to cut out this frame. I'm gonna need to make
a much larger background if I wanna zoom into this thing or move anywhere, this background needs to be bigger. So I need to extend that. And I need to erase this guy from it, so that's two elements that we need. I want his scarf to be fluttering so that's three. His torso, that's gonna be four. And then five is gonna be this arm. I wanna isolate this arm here. And in particular, one of the challenges of isolating this arm is that I have to paint what's under it. I have to replace the arm with whatever the torso would be if that arm wasn't there. And so that's the challenge
that is before us. We're gonna do a bit of show and tell. I'm gonna speed up some of the process, I'm gonna highlight some of the tools, and hopefully that'll give you what you need to make this
process work for yourself. So let's start by isolating. I like to use the pen tool. The pen tool is my buddy when it comes to isolating things. The pen tool is fairly easy to use, if you're already familiar
with After Effects, the pen tool works the same way, except you call it up by hitting P. A crazy concept. And then you just go in, you click to add a point, you drag to pull out its bezier handles. If you're not happy with your first click, hold down space bar and move it around. If you don't want the two
handles to be together, hold down alt. So, those are the basics
for using the pen tool. And then you just kind of go around and try to fit it into whatever
space you think it goes. One of the tips, I would say, with the pen tool is you wanna do things with the fewest points possible. Once you've got your mask drawn, it shows up as what's called a work path up here in the path window. So, how do we now apply this to a layer? Well, I'm gonna take this original, I'm gonna drag it down here and duplicate, and then with my work path selected and my layer selected, hold down Command and hit the mask button. It's chosen to just go ahead and make this layer here only what's inside that mask. Well, that's not really what I'm into, so I'm gonna use my mask selection button, select this mask, and now I'm going to choose from this menu right here, this little bad boy here, and I'm gonna say subtract from shape. By default, what's inside
the mask is what you keep. So if you need to change that, this is where you do it. I'm gonna go ahead and isolate
the rest of the object. All of the time I'm gonna be creating new layers and naming them accordingly so that I don't lose a lot of information. I'm very used to the non-destructive way that I work in After Effects, so I wanna keep that going here in Photoshop. And now we have the arm and then the torso behind the arm, and then we've got that scarf that we wanted to isolate as well, we've got the frame, and then what will become the background. So, these elements need some touch ups before we're able to use them. Especially this background, because that's just a
copy of the original. So let's start there and fix the background. What I need to do is make it seem like this character was never there, and I wanna paint away the frame as well. I'm gonna start by grabbing
my selection tool here, this is my polygon selection tool, you can do it however you like, but I want to select all the areas that I wanna fill in. So, I'm gonna start by
having a nice feather, maybe 20 pixels here. With them selected, I'm gonna go edit, content-aware fill. We're gonna make use of some artificial intelligence to make them go away. Now, this actually looks pretty good, it did a pretty good job even though I'm not interested in using any of the frame out here. I don't think this frame information is actually very helpful to filling in what I would like. As you can see it's gonna
start to compute some things, figure stuff out for me. You can start to remove even more of that try to make it a little bit
more accurate to what we want. Where is it going to output to? Let's just paste it on
top of the current layer, we already named it background, I'm happy with that. So would you look at that, we made this guy go away. So on the background, I wanna start painting out
the rest of this stuff. So I'm gonna use this tool over here that we call the healing brush. The healing brush is very
similar to the clone stamp in that we are going to
also be selecting an area, ♪ Do do do do do, ♪ oh that's way too big. So we're going to be sampling an area, and then moving it on over, but you'll notice that there are some weird
kind of updates happening. It's using a little bit of blending to try to make these
things a little bit nicer of a fit. So with this, we're just gonna try
to paint away the frame using pixels that are
kind of near the frame. And I'm just gonna go ahead and keep pushing those pixels, sampling near the frame, near enough, and then
going on top of the frame and painting it away. And with all that frame removed, now you can go ahead
and make your brush size a little bit larger, maybe just sample from the middle or somewhere with some nice texture, and then just try to
paint the edges out a bit. And there we go, this looks like a nice
kind of background plate that we could do. Now, what needs to be touched up next? I think we can touch up this scarf a little bit, I think. Let's switch to the clone stamp so you can get a little picture of how that might work. We're gonna select some of these nice, crisp folds here. What I really like about
the clone stamp tool is that you get to preserve the details. So let's try to do exactly that. Painting away the shoulder, making use of nearby pixels, oh yes, oh yeah, I'm enjoying this. If you wanna expand it even more, I might rasterize the vector mask and then apply the layer mask, creating a layer that only has these pixels on it, and then I can go ahead and start continuing to sample. I'm happy with that now, so now I think we've saved maybe the hardest touch up for last. This torso here. How are we gonna fix this up? We need to paint away this arm, and we need to paint
away this finger here. So what I usually end up doing is a combination of techniques. Most notably I like to grab patches using just the selection tool. I like to just grab a
nice big patch of pixels that look like they belong, and then we just layer via copy, hit V, and then we kind of drag this into place somewhere, and we just try to fill up as much as we can. And then you might use the eraser tool to kind of take away bites from it before you merge it down. So Command + E will merge this down. Preserve the layer mask, and again, the healing brush can be our friend. So we can select areas of texture. You'll notice that it really erodes quite a lot of detail out of the image using the healing brush. So it might not be right all the time, and in fact, we want to
avoid that little button. If we were to touch it
with the healing brush, it might go away altogether. Also up here on the face where we have the most
detail to worry about, I like to go ahead and
use my selection tool, I like to try to grab, say, half of this face here. I'm gonna grab just this
half over here, good. And we're gonna layer that via copy, we are going to hit V, and then shift, we're gonna flip it over like this, and we're gonna try to construct a second half of a mouth. Hold down Command, and you can kind of warp. Hit enter to okay that. And then I'm gonna use the eraser just a little, little, little eraser here to try to just erase. So then I might merge that down. What I might do is start using the healing brush as a much smaller size, selecting up here similar pixels and start trying to paint away sometimes getting in very fine detail. I think that's actually good enough. So I think we're ready to
move into After Effects and make this stuff work. So we've got After Effects open, let's import our saved PSD of our kind of good photo touch up job. We're gonna bring in the thing we saved and we want to make sure that we're bringing them in as a composition retained layer sizes. We want to retain the layer sizes. We end up with this composition. And inside this composition, we've got all of our isolated layers. We've got the arm, the torso, the scarf. Let's take them and precompose them. To organize your animations, I really recommend that
you isolate the things that are gonna live together. So let's call this the Subject, that'll be very helpful. And we're just gonna push the subject between the frame and the background. So one of the things we wanted to do was to animate this guy's arm. We can do that, of course, just by taking the pan behind tool, hitting Y to call that up, moving the anchor point right over here into the shoulder, parenting the arm to the torso. We should parent the scarf to
the torso while we're at it. And then you can just
rotate the arm around. You can really Monty Python it up. ♪ Do do do, do do do do do do ♪ if you so desire. However, we have a more
nuanced take we can use. We can go ahead and grab the puppet pin tool. So the puppet pin tool is gonna stick pins onto this layer, apply a deformation mesh, and let us warp it around. So I'm showing the mesh, we are choosing how far outside of the alpha bounds of the layer we're going to expand that mesh, and then how dense that mesh is. I'm gonna start by putting a little pin up in the hand. Because the hand is
something I wanna move. I'm gonna put one in the elbow, because I want us to rotate this limb independently. And then I'm gonna put one, a few actually, in the shoulder. I'm gonna kind of pin around the shoulder a little bit. The more pins you stick into something, the more stable it can get. And there are many
other pins to deal with. We're just gonna use the regular puppet position pin tool. We'll probably come back
and revisit the pin tool in depth in another tutorial. But for now, this is all you need. Now by dropping these things down, we've got this mesh that is now full of these pins that we can deform. If we hit the U key, we've got a bunch of key frames for all of them. I'm only interested in
the first two I made, pin one and pin two. So I'm gonna delete the key frame for everybody else. And you can rename these, so pin two, I might rename that to elbow. And I might rename puppet pin one to hand. This is gonna be really helpful if you start to get a
lot of pins in something, renaming these is great. So we know where we want them to end up, we want them to be up here, as he's shushing. And now let's go back a little bit and just move these pins around. So you can see it starts to stretch the guy's arm out in a funny way. But let's go ahead, just grab one of them, and move it down a bit, grab the other one, move it down a bit. And you want to really consider not getting too far off model with this. Whenever you're going to use the puppet pin tool, I really recommend you pay close attention to these lines here. And you wanna make sure that
they're not straight lines, you wanna take your convert vertex tool and click on those, just to make them into some subtle curves. The strangeness here and what I think gets a lot of people bent about the puppet pin tool is these are nowhere near those. And that's because of
the relative positioning of all of this stuff. We parented the arm to the torso which is very helpful but it does make where these little markers end up, where these motion paths are a little be confusing. Remember, subtlety is
your friend with these and don't go too crazy. Something else that is important is you should always be easing. Hit F9, then I like to
go into the graph editor, grab the handles, and give them a little pull. Pull the graph a little bit. I'm looking at a speed graph here and I really like to have things ease into a stop. So he's like "Ah shhh." Now, we also talked about
animating the scarf. To animate the scarf, we could stick a bunch
of puppet pins in here but I don't think that's a great idea. We're gonna use something called the turbulent displace effect. So you can just bring that out onto the scarf layer and the amount is how displaced it is, the size is how big
those displacements are. And depending on your image, these numbers might be different. The big things we're gonna use to actually animate this are the evolution and the offset. So the offset we can just drag through and it's like a breeze is getting pushed through the object. And the evolution is like
that breeze is changing, so we're altering the fractal that is actually powering this. And then we're moving that fractal around. So we're gonna keyframe the
offset and the evolution. I think we're gonna go ahead a bunch and let's just set the
evolution up to one rotation all the way through, and the offset, let me just drag this handle over there. So it's "Oh shh oh man "I was having such a good time "it's so windy." One final thing is we are going to pin part of this. We're going to take part of that layer and say "This part doesn't move." And so we are going to pin the right hand side over here where the scarf is logically
attached to his head. So it's not gonna be as fluttery around over here on the right hand side. Again, you should probably
ease these keyframes and make them a little bit more nuanced. Nothing should be so static and strange. The final thing I wanted to talk about is creating a parallax effect. We use that to make a little bit of an infinite zoom in the intro, but in this let's just worry about the parallaxing part and we'll come back to an infinite zoom in another video. So, we can go ahead and take these layers, make them 3D, create a new camera, and I like to use something
like a 24 millimeter camera. Hit okay on that, and we're gonna take the frame, subject, and background, call up their position. We're gonna push the
background into the back, away it goes, maybe 500. We're going to take the frame and pull it forward maybe -500. I don't really like the size of this composition, because this is not how
I would export this. So I'm gonna change the
composition settings and we are gonna go in here and go for my square preset, my Instagram friendly preset. Call up the scale on these elements and just start scaling them down to where they feel correct. So let's get the frame in like that, let's scale this person up in the frame, and now let's scale the background up to be quite large. So because we've pushed these things using their position, if I start moving the
camera forward and backward, notice we get some
parallax happening here. Oh, la di dah. So that is working out for me. I'm gonna reframe this guy to be in the middle and maybe continue to
scale him a little bit. We're not super concerned with being super true
to the original image unless your goal is to end up in the exact kind of configuration. I'm really more concerned about being close and using this to create pleasing motion. So one thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna set a
couple of keyframes here for the position of the camera, so that we can show off our parallaxing. So let's go here, and now let's push in like so. And you'll notice we have
a couple of problems. One of them is that the background can be seen extending beyond the frame. And that the frame itself is a little bit janky. So for the frame, I'm gonna select the frame, I'm just gonna double
click on the mask tool to create a new mask, and I'm gonna take this mask and I'm just gonna pull it in, we can just solo the frame here for this work, and I'm using the transform tools on that frame like so. So now that janky background is gone. But we don't wanna see
the background anymore. In fact, that makes us sad to see the background. And we've got a little bit of our buddy hanging out the bottom here. So I'm going to double click up here to just make a shape layer. And I'm gonna call this the matte. I'm gonna make it 3D, and I'm gonna parent it to the frame. Because we want the frame to be the thing that helps guide cutting these objects off. So with the ellipse, I'm just going to go into the ellipse path and I'm gonna alter its size to be, I don't know, kind of this big, just kind of sitting in
the middle of the frame. And so this matte, I'm gonna put one that
lives above the background, and I'm going to go to the background, I'm going to go to its track matte, toggle between switches and modes, and I'm gonna say alpha matte of the layer I called matte. So we can only see the background where there are pixels of this matte. And because it is aligned with this frame, you'll notice even if we zoom in and out, we don't get the background poking out beyond the frame anymore. We can just repeat that process by duplicating this, dragging it above the subject, and changing the subject's track matte to reference in the same way, and there we go. Problem solved. We've got that parallax
problem locked down. But we've covered off those basic tools we got the puppet pin, we got some parallax, we got masks, we got mattes, and then we've got that
turbulent displace. And I think we did a pretty good job with all of those. Well, thank you so much for watching, and spending some time with me here on the EC Abrams channel. I hope you were able to
use all these techniques and follow along. But if not, if you got stuck anywhere, please, let me know your
questions in the comments and I'll try to get you through. And if you make something
cool with this thing and I know that you will, then I would love to see it. Tag me on Instagram, @ecabrams on there, or share a gif or something
with me on Twitter, I'm @ecabrams on there as well. If this is the kind of
thing you like learning, motion design, After Effects, visual effects, all that good stuff, then subscribe to this channel, and make sure you turn on notifications so you don't miss a single one. That's it for me, I'm Evan Abrams, thanks again for watching, and have a great day.
