Compositing Basics in After Effects | RocketStock

hey guys this is Charles Jaeger with rocket stock in this tutorial I'm going to cover some compositing basics that are essential for anyone working in After Effects these tips will help you achieve more realistic results and you're adding things into a scene so let's go ahead an get started with our first scene here what I've got here is a shot of a town square and what I'm trying to do is composite in this billboard you can see this is a completely CG billboard what I've done is taking an image of it you can see I'm going to turn this on and off here so you can see that so the idea here is I want to composite this into this shot so that it kind of blends in realistically and when I say that really what I think is I don't want to draw any attention to it where people might see that and say okay oh that's been added in post-production so it's obviously they're gonna see this here I want to make it seem as if it's just part of the original scene and for me there's really four basic elements they're gonna make something like this compositing the scene look a lot better and those four things are gonna be color saturation sharpness grain and color tint so let's get started with color saturation so what I'm gonna do is I want to select the billboard I want to come over here to effect now I'm gonna go to color correction we're gonna apply the effect luma tree color this effect has quite a few different options into a Nick I can really substitute it in for numerous other effects that use in the past it's this is a really good one to start out with so we're gonna come up here to basic correction and under basic correction you're gonna see we have saturation and typically on CG elements the colors are really gonna be saturated especially when we compare this to real-world footage if you look at the footage here it's definitely a lot flatter and the saturated colors aren't nearly saturated as this billboard is so what I like to do is bring the saturation down just kind of take some bite out of the image you can see around 80 percent or so just even doing that makes us look a lot more flat more realistic with our normal footage next we can address the sharpness so if I go ahead and zoom in here you can see on this CG element when you render stuff out is simply gonna have very sharp edges and be very almost too clean and if we compare that with the actual footage shot even though this footage or shot in 4k there's definitely still a softness to the footage versus this billboard that's really text sharp so we want to take a little bit of that edge off of that what we can do for that and come over here under creative you're gonna see we have a sharpen effect here but actually we can bring this down into the negative when I do that you'll see it applies a subtle blur on top of that layer so I'm just gonna set this to be like negative ten again just kind of taking the bite out of that this can also help if you have any edging or aliasing on your CG model you can help alleviate that applying you so a little bit of blur just kind of again matching our original footage the next thing we want to do because this is a still image it's gonna be kind of lifeless right now we want to apply a little bit of film grain to this to match the grain or noise we might have had on our DSLR for this particular scene now this is a daylight scene with a low ISO so there's not that much grain but if we just apply just just settle them out to this billboard I think it'll go a long ways so with the billboard selected I'm gonna come up here to effect we're gonna come out here to noise and grain but we're just gonna apply the noise effect this is a very quick rendering effect and if we go ahead and close up the limit recolor effect here you can see noise and mount and I like to leave color noise on we're just going to set this it's something like three percent and I want to zoom in here really close so we can kind of see what's happening when I did a quick Ram preview of this and if we look at this it may be a little difficult to see what the compression of this tutorial but we have a little bit of grain you can see on the windows here kind of dark area you can see that now being reflected on our billboard now showing up a little bit more prominent on the billboard here because it's kind of more contrasting right now than the actual scene is we can fix that in just a moment here I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer just in case you couldn't see this with the compression but you can see that it's subtle amount of noise on the billboard just making that look like it's actually part of the scene and you can see a little bit here on these windows okay so the final way we're gonna composite this into the shot we're gonna do a color tint effect and I call this the poor man's color matcher and this is probably the most effective of the four effects we're gonna apply to this to make it again look as if it's actually naturally in the scene so what I'm gonna do here actually I need to set this up just a little bit though I'm gonna right-click here and I'm gonna create a new adjustment layer this is just gonna be a temporary layer I'm gonna put this below the billboard I'm actually gonna turn the billboard off just for the time being and on that adjustment layer I want to apply a fast box blur and I'm gonna select that fast box blur and I'm just gonna apply it to the adjustment layer now let's go ahead and increase the blur radius and I'm just gonna check on our pH pixels now this is just so we can kind of blend all the colors together because we're gonna actually color pick a few different spot of this image and when we apply this blur this just ensures we don't actually like pick the wrong color and we're not intending because sometimes on the pixel level it can be difficult to pinpoint of color so let's go ahead and turn the billboard layer back on and with the billboard selected I'm gonna apply the tint effect it's gonna be located under color correction I'll just apply that to the billboard and immediately you're gonna see it's went black and white so I'm gonna bring the tint amount all the way down to zero so the idea is we're gonna map the black color here to a darker area of our scene and the white color to a lighter color of our actual scene so I'm gonna select the color picker for the black area and I'm just gonna picking this kind of darker Brown right here so one hand selected that and then for the map white too I'll select the color picker and I want to pick a lighter color in my scene for this so maybe this slider yellow color or maybe even actually the sky so I'm gonna select right there on that so you can see the two colors we have here selected so I'm gonna go ahead and turn that adjustment layer off so now watch what happens to this build we're gonna go ahead and increase the amount to tint as I bring this up you're gonna see the colors are gonna start to blend in and match more with the actual color space of the real world shot you can see I kind of lighten things up before it was a little too contrasty and what I like to do is usually set this around 15 to 30 percent again this just helps to blend it in with the same colors of our natural scene you can see what this looks like if I go ahead and toggle this on and off you can see what a difference that actually makes again blending everything to match this with the same color aesthetic of our original shot and you can use this color matcher trick on all types of different layers I want to say a quick another example here I've got this shot of an eagle on an alpha Channel I'm just gonna drag and drop that into the scene you can see it's way back there in the distance I'll just zoom into that so we can take a look and you can see this Eagle if it's gonna be farther away in the distance it's not gonna be that contrast you can see how dark that is I just move through this a little bit you can see so if you have mountains or buildings further in the distance obviously they're gonna be kind of lighter less saturated in color tone so I'm actually gonna apply the tint effect to this eagle shot just apply that and we can kind of emulate that it's really far back kind of in space and with this type of situation what I would do is actually just like two colors of the blue here because it's not really over any other background color and I'll just bring the amount of tint all the way down to the bottom and if i zoom in here I'm just gonna gradually increase this to where it kind of looks like it's just further back in the distance and you can see what a difference that tint effect makes on that eagle for that composite again making sure it looks like it's really far back in the distance now finally something else we can look at here I've got this image of this brush I'm just gonna bring that into the shot let's say I was wanting to add this somewhere into the scene we down here in the bottom corner and obviously right now it's it's CG that's tack sharp it doesn't look realistic and we want this to be out of focus whenever you want to apply a realistic blur to something like this brush in this case we want to use the camera lens blur so I'm just gonna type in camera lens blur and I'm gonna apply that to this brush and this is a much more realistic blur effects can be any more natural camera bouquet however I do want to say does render a lot slower so definitely be careful when you're using this effect a lot your renders will slow down but that's kind of a price you pay for a more realistic result so I'm gonna come here I'm gonna increase this blur radius a little bit as you can see we get a nice looking blur and if you want the bokeh to look a little bit nicer on the highlights just come over here to the highlight section of the effect go ahead and increase the gain to 100% and then for the threshold I'm just gonna drag this down and you can see you can set it to a point where we're getting some nice highlights and these will be kind of a little bit wider colored and at first these highlights will be less saturated if you want to go ahead and saturate those up just increase the saturation here it was a blend a little bit nicer now one drawback that I found when I apply the camera lens blur sometimes it kind of makes remember the object is closer to the foreground become a little transparent and for whatever you're compositing in this may look nice but you want it to look a little bit more filled in a simple trick you just select whatever layer you've applied and go ahead and hit control D or command V on a Mac to duplicate it and you can see when I duplicate that it kind of fills that back in so it's not quite as transparent and I think that looks a little more realistic finally just to sell the composite a little bit more let's go ahead and apply some grain on top of that brush layer as well that'll look nice with that kind of out-of-focus effect and to do that we're gonna apply these same noise effect again and we'll just like that noise effects under noise and grain again and apply that to the top copy of that brush i zoom in here we can increase this to about probably three percent and that'll just give us a little bit of nice grain it'll match our original shot finally just to wrap us up with another scene I've got this shot of these barrels and I went ahead and applied the lower saturation they blur the grain and the tint effect of these to match them with this scene you can see if I go ahead and toggle on and off the tint effect the difference that actually makes and another kind of essential core part of compositing is gonna be using blending modes and you can see I'm going to turn on a layer of guy here which is this fire coming out of this barrel and this is how the clip actually looks at fires over black and want to go ahead and mention that this fire clip is from the action pack light from the freebie packs you can download directly from rocket stock if you want to go ahead and download that pack and recreate something like this yourself but I want to apply this fire to my scene using a blending mode we can come down here you can see with the layer you'll see mode and if you don't see that just hit f4 on the keyboard and with fire and stuff like that I like to use a screen blending mode you'll see how that kind of isolates just the fire and it still kind of pops on the screen there another quick shortcut if you want to scroll through the blending modes when you select one just go ahead and select one then hold shift and push plus-or-minus at the top of your keyboard then allow you to quickly scroll through all the different blending modes just kind of an extra tip there but again I'm gonna use a screen blending mode and this looks pretty good it looks a little transparent so another way we can kind of fill this in a little bit more just by doing the duplicate trick again so I'm gonna select that fire layer I'm gonna hit control D or command E on a Mac and that'll duplicate that you can see now it looks a lot more vibrant it looks more realistic like fire for this actual scene and actually another trick we can do if we duplicate that one more time what I can do on that top duplicate copy I'm gonna apply a fast box blur to that as well and what this will allow us to do if I apply this to that top copy and go ahead and increase the blur radius just a little bit here you'll see it kind of adds a limit of a subtle glow around the fire the flames we can zoom in here and you can see that so that's another way you can add a little bit of extra glow on an element like this alright guys hopefully enjoy this tutorial covering a lot of the basics and kind of core elements of compositing inside of After Effects don't forget to check out other tutorials just like this one on rocket stocks blog again this has been Charles Yeager with rocket stock thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

Channel: RocketStock

Views: 65,544

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Id: 1v9KA8p2rYg

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018