How to Animate Still Images with After Effects and Photoshop

in the next five minutes you're going to learn the secret behind how to bring your two-dimensional designs to life as a cinematic animation and this is all made possible by envato elements and their incredible library of millions and millions and millions of creative assets and they now offer a free seven-day trial so those millions of creative assets well they all come equipped with a commercial license and absolutely everything is just 16.50 a month if you sign up annually which is just absolutely bonkers so using a few assets from envato elements i've created this scene as a psd file that you can download in the video description so download the project files grab a bunch of assets and let's get started rightio so we're now in photoshop and you can see the final design and if you're working with your own design you'll want to organize your layers into folders based on their distance from the camera and you can see my character here in a separate group and when compositing these are the best adjustment layers to use either of these three can work for balancing exposure and color balance is best for matching colors i've also got a folder with some effects here as well you could do this in photoshop or you can do it in after effects once everything's set up the next step is to export each group as its own png file and this png file will have transparency next give it a file name and save this to a location of your choice and then do this again for each layer or folder in your scene so if you're following along we're doing one for background foreground and then the out of focus foliage as well i'm also going to throw together a logo so let's turn everything on and add a new layer we'll call this logo and then select the type tool click anywhere and type some text i'm going to type the word fourth and then from the color picker set the color to white and then make the text bigger and position it in the center now it's time to pick a font and i'm going to be using one downloaded from envato elements i'll link this in the video description and it's called noah turn or n i've got no idea however you say it now that's done i'm going to add a layer mask and then select the brush tool from the drop down at the top i can open up my brush library and pretty much most of these are from envato elements as well and down here i've got some grunge brushes and i'm going to pick one of these and then together with the color black i'm going to brush into the mask adding a distressed effect to the text and just check you're at 100 opacity as well okay grunge time [Music] also once the logo is done export that as a png as well and next it's time to hop into after effects so first of all let's create a new composition i'm working at 4k for the size the frame rate 24 frames a second and this will introduce a little bit more motion blur and i'm going to set the duration to about 20 seconds next let's create a group for our assets and give this a name and then press command or control i to import those png files we created earlier together with a bunch of assets from envato elements that are also linked below now the first step is to rebuild the scene by dragging each png file to the timeline below now that's done i'm also going to add the logo but we don't need this just yet so let's hide this one next i'm going to add a new camera you can give the camera a name these default settings are fine click ok and then we're going to add a null object this is going to be what we use to control the camera so let's call this camera controller and then we can select the pick whip icon and drag this from the camera to the new null object and with the null object selected we can press p on the keyboard and adjust the position but you'll notice it doesn't work that's because we need to check this box here to set this as a 3d layer we then need to do the same for all of the other layers otherwise they won't be affected by the camera and now we can adjust the position of the camera along the x y and z axes in 3d space now let's enable two views which makes it easier working in 3d space let's select the one on the left and then from this drop down here change the view to top and then if i select the background layer and press p i can now move this along the z-axes and you can see it moves closer or further away from the camera so you can see i've pushed the background into the distance but it doesn't fill the frame anymore so to fix this press s on the keyboard and then scale this up so it looks the same but actually the background is further away from the camera next i'm going to do the same for the out of focus foliage and bring this closer to the camera and there we go we've added some distance between all three layers next let's bring the playhead to the beginning select all three of the png layers press p on the keyboard and add a keyframe for position you can see the keyframe added here let's scrub forward in time i'm going to go for about 10 seconds and then i'm going to change the z position for each layer individually and by changing this value it creates a new keyframe so the background is going to be quite subtle but for the foreground i want the camera to zoom past the character now if you get this issue occur where your timeline doesn't play don't worry the easy fix for this is to go over here and change this back to one view scrub back to the beginning and try again no idea why this is a thing but uh yeah there's your workaround and after tinkering with the timings you should have something that looks like this so that's looking pretty good i'm happy with that next i'm going to do the same thing for the logo so once it appears it will then gradually get bigger now for this next step i'm going to switch back to two camera views and then if i twizzle down the options for the camera layer and as you can see there are a lot of camera options available one of which is depth of field so let's turn that on and this enables us to control the focus distance of the camera which will determine which layers are in or out of focus so there's lots of settings here and you can keyframe them all as well right let's switch back to one view just to be on the safe side and i'm now going to add some keyframes for the aperture and the focus distance an aperture is one of those settings that will control how blurry your image is so at the start of the animation i want the focus to be on the character and as we move past the character the background will start to come into focus so you can see me just keyframing all of this in now and then let's give this a play and see how it looks [Music] nice and now that we've set up a solid animation it's time to enhance this with some visual and audio effects from envato elements so you can see i have some particles here i'll make this fill the viewport and then right click and change the blending mode to something like screen this blends the dark areas into the background leaving just the particles i also have an optical lens flare effect which is pretty cool and i'll go with color dodge for the blending mode i've also got a cinematic metal hit sound so when the logo appears we get this thud and lastly i've got an epic soundtrack to accompany the whole thing and this last part of the process is my favorite so go crazy and just have a ton of fun downloading as much as you can so this was a very quick example but hopefully a good taster of what envato elements can do for your creative work now it's also worth mentioning that the trial is being rolled out gradually so you'll need to check if it's available in your country and if you try and decide that it's not for you just make sure you cancel because you don't want to get charged right that's all from me i hope you have as much fun using envato elements as i do and i think to close out the video we'll uh we'll just check out the final animation just one more time you

Channel: Dansky

Views: 476,882

Keywords: after effects animation, after effects tutorial, animate a photo in after effects, animate a photo in after effects tutorial, animate still images, animate still images in after effects, animate still images tutorial, animation tutorial, cinemagraph tutorial, cinematic animation tutorial, dansky, envato elements, envato elements for free, how to animate a photo, how to animate photos, how to animate still images, how to animate still images in after effects

Id: NrBHiEuNhiE

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022