How to Easily Animate a Photoshop File in After Effects

[Music] hey everybody terry white here and welcome to my channel today we're going to take a look at a topic that came up actually kind of by accident and it's really how to animate a photoshop layered file in after effects so recently i created a new social media kind of fly out i think you probably just saw it and and i just basically put together the photoshop file uh made all my separate layers and layer groups made all my social media even went and found the right colors for facebook and and twitter and so forth and so on and then i put once i put together the layered file i was like well i don't want to just pop up on the screen and then go away i kind of like all the things that slide out and then all the things to slide away when when they're done so i decided to animate it in after effects and of course once i did that people started asking how did you create your new social media profile animation so that's what i'm going to walk you through right now it's pretty quick and easy to do even if you've never used after effects before because you're doing most of the work in photoshop it's really not that hard to do this once you have a nice layered file so let's go ahead and take a look at what i've done so i'm going to pop over to photoshop and this is all it is so all i did to get started with this just for people that are saying hey you know i don't and you know i don't even know how to get started in photoshop let's do a new document and i use the um print and or film and video template i did the 1080p hd tv if you need one that's 4k or whatever you can make that one but i did that one and the only difference is instead of using the template which defaults to a white background i changed it to be transparent so i wouldn't have a background at all so that gave me the right document size and then i just built all my layers so i um i create i used that first layer and i said okay let's make a rectangle marquee selection and again i'm not making these exact size but i got that one the right size then i said okay i need to fill it in with a nice color i went and found the exact blue that i needed but let's just fake it for now and then once i did that i hit option on the mac delete or pc alt delete or alt backspace to fill it in then i deselected it all right so once i got it deselect it then i was like okay that's my first layer that'll be the one for i don't know whatever twitter renamed it twitter and then i went and uh typed my name on it in white text and then of course once i got that all set duplicated it and then that gave me the second one that all i had to do then was just pull it down you know space it apart um select it by holding down my command key on mac pc control key and click on the transparency of the layer that will make a selection then all you have to do is of course pick your next color and i'm just making these up as i go along because of course i've already got this all set and then uh option delete or alt delete or alt backspace on pc to make that one the right color so on each one i then went in and typed in um you know whatever i wanted to go on that layer so for my twitter for example it's at terry white oh let's make it the right all lowercase terry l white is my actual twitter let's make it left justified and of course let's make it white so it looks good on that blue background and then you can make it whatever font you want whatever size you want so forth and so on so that's how i started building the photoshop file and just you know creating it once duplicating it changing the color and so forth and so on so now i'm going to close this because this is just to show you how to if you've never created a photoshop file from scratch how you create your photoshop file from scratch in the right size and then creating your elements and of course i use the the logos that i got from stock adobe stock for twitter instagram and facebook got those all in there you can use whatever you want i'm going to go ahead and close this don't save it and then show you the finished file so the finished file i actually used a gradient for the original rectangle because that's what instagram uses they use a gradient and i also organized everything in layer groups so instead of having a group for the color or a item for the color uh a separate item for the text and a separate item for the logo all separate in the layers panel once i put those three things in there then i group them together in a layer group which you can create that just by clicking the layer group icon on the bottom right and of course then that turn allows you to turn on turn off and move the entire group so that way it just keeps it nice and tidy nice and neat and then you have your ability to go ahead and export the or save out the entire file so once i'm done or once you're done building all your layers and all your layer groups and i highly recommend um you you for after effects you make layer groups for the each individual item so that it's easier to animate the whole item as opposed to the individual i have to move the logo i have to move the text i have to move the blue background that way you get to animate the whole thing as one so that's another reason why you want to whenever possible work with layer groups in photoshop just to make your life easier so that when you head over to after effects all this separate stuff is treated as one even though you can still edit it as separate items okay once i did that um of course to keep all the layers you want to save it out and save it to your computer and you want to save it as a photoshop file that way you'll get to keep all the layers so you're going to save it as a psd i'll save this one out i think i say i'll save this one out to the desktop but you're going to save it out wherever you want and let's make a new folder for it so we'll know where it is um psd to ae so photoshop to after effects that's where we're gonna put it you put it wherever you need it wherever you're gonna know where it is i should say and then uh that will keep all the layers that'll keep everything maintained and that way you can come back and make changes if you want to so forth and so on so that's the photoshop work once you get the photoshop file looking the way you want then it's time to head over to after effects so that you can animate it so i'm going to pop over to after effects which i already have running and in after effects i'm going to create a new project now once i have this new project i'm i want to create a new composition from the footage so after effects works with compositions those are like the timelines and or sequences in premiere so i'm going to create a new composition now new composition normally would just be blank and then you bring items in and animate them but we already have everything all ready to go from photoshop so we're just going to say new composition from footage click it it's going to then bring up a window asking me where is the footage you want to bring in i'm going to go to the desktop oh yep and there's my folder i created psd 2 ae and don't just double click and open real quick because there's some choices you need to make so we're going to select the file we're not going to be in a hurry and then instead of importing it as footage this is one of the first things we need to change we want to import it as a composition and more importantly retain the layer sizes so let me explain the difference between footage composition retain the layer sizes and composition you bring it in as footage just going to bring it in as one thing so all three bars come in as one thing and you won't be able to animate them separately that's obviously not what we want we don't want footage so then what's the difference between bringing it as a composition retaining layer sizes or just the composition we bring it in retaining the layer sizes well remember we made that big 1920 by 1080 window with all that empty space and then the bars are over on the right hand side well if you bring it in as just a composition then it will shrink it down to only the space only the stuff that's on the layers themselves so we obviously want the full size of our composition and retaining the layer sizes so that we get all that empty space too so i'm just going to go ahead and hit open and you're going to say well once it opens oh wait hang on there's one more window let me bring that window over so it's saying you have a choice because if you use layer styles you can make those layer styles editable so like if you use the drop shadow or anything like that you would be able to edit those layer styles or you can just merge them in i didn't use any layer styles nothing that i need to animate separately so i'm just going to go ahead and merge them now nothing happened in the window but it did actually bring in the composition over here in the project window so if i look in the project window there it is my new composition tw social media flyouts that's the psd that we saved now double click on it when we double click on the icon it all starts to come become real we can actually see what we're doing we can actually see we can actually see the individual layers which you can click on and these are the layer groups this is what i meant put them in a layer group because then they're that much easier to animate and then there's one thing i want to do while we're here because i'm going to be dragging these things separately i kind of don't want to mess up the alignment like i want to keep them aligned exactly where they are so i'm going to hit command r to bring up my ruler and then i'm going to pull out a ruler guy while we've got them exactly in place where we need them to be and put that ruler guy right there so that when i animate them out i know to stop at that ruler guy so that's just a quick thing for me to do all right so now that we got our three layers there's one for instagram one for twitter and one for facebook we need to tell all three layers that there's one property we want to animate and that's the position you can animate the position you can animate the rotation you can animate the opacity you can animate all kinds of attributes but in this case and let me show you what i mean by that if i wanted to get to all the properties for instagram for example that i could animate i could twirl this down and twirl down transform and there they all are i can animate the anchor point the position the scale the rotation and the opacity we only want position that's the only one because we're just going to have them slide out slide back in so we don't we don't need them we don't need to animate the opacity or anything else so a quick way around that so that you don't have to twirl each one down and go to them individually so we're going to go ahead and select all three layers this is just a shortcut and you're going to hit the letter p for position so once i hit the letter p notice it it exposes position for each one that way i don't have to think about i have to think about twirling them down and finding position for each one so it's just a shortcut you can twirl them down and do them manually but if you if you're like let's say you had 50 layers you don't want to have to twirl down 50 layers and find position each for each one when you can just do it all as one okay so now the next thing is to tell after effects we want to do this over time there's two things we want to happen number one i just realized that your composition may not be the right length meaning that after effects defaults to 30 seconds for a new composition if you don't do anything that's not what i want so i want to make sure that i go into my composition settings before we go any further composition settings up here under composition and i'm going to bring that window over i just want to make sure that your composition duration is and i might as remember from last time 14 seconds 29 or 29 frames so basically 15 seconds yours probably says if you have never changed this 29.29 so you want to change that 29 to 14 just so your composition or 10 or whatever you want it to be like i pick 15 seconds yours can be as long you can be 30 seconds it'd be 40 seconds as long as you want this animation to take so i figured i wouldn't annoy people with my social media more than 15 seconds all right so 15 seconds mine's already set i'm gonna hit cancel you would click okay after you make a change now that we know the composition from zero to fifteen seconds is right we know that we got our three layers and we expose position for each one great now we're going to go ahead and click the stopwatch which is the little icon next to position and we're going to that sets a keyframe these little blue triangles it set that little blue triangle for each layer at zero seconds so at zero seconds we're now going to tell it what to do well at zero seconds it shouldn't be visible at all you should not see anything so i'm going to take all three layers that are selected and simply drag them off now if you're dragging them and it's not you know like you're you're worried you're going to drag them up or down then hold down the shift key so that you can drag them in a straight line across so now at zero seconds meaning the animation first comes up you don't see anything and that's where that first key frame is going to be set now we're going to say okay for um for now we're going to move our ti our playhead or our time thing here our playhead we're going to move it to like one second so at one second what should have happened so one second well instagram should be there so i'm just going to pull instagram back out i got that nice um uh ruler guide to line it up on and that's where instagram should be at one second so at one second if i don't do anything else this is what happens i pull it back and i hit play at one second instagram comes out and it stays there for 14 more seconds because i didn't tell it to do anything else and then it would just end we obviously want to do more than that so we want the next one to come out a little bit later not at one second but maybe one and a half seconds so you pull your playhead to wherever you want that to be in my case about one and a half seconds and then we're gonna pull the next one out so we're gonna click on the next layer hold down the shift key after you start dragging it and line it up with the um with the ruler guide so there that one plays so now you've got this going on so we hit play and they start to come out and boom at one and a half seconds that one happens now i'm gonna go a little bit past two seconds maybe two and a quarter two and a half somewhere around there if i because i want my third one to come out now so i click on my third one drag it out hold down my shift key so i just keep it straight and now i've got my animation all set at least the beginning part so the beginning part all three come out this is what it would look like if we hit play spacebar they all three come out and they would technically it would go all the way to the end 15 seconds takes forever when you're waiting for it by the way 15 seconds goes by quick any other time but when you're waiting for it goes all the way to the end and then it just starts over again because you didn't tell it to do anything else okay so we don't want that we don't want it to sit there forever and then just disappear we want them to sit there to a certain amount of time and then go away so how do we do that how we tell it to sit there to a certain amount of time and then maybe back off the screen like they came on so what we're gonna do we're gonna pull the playhead all the way over to maybe uh you know somewhere around 13 seconds now here's the here's the the rookie mistake i'll call it that new after effects users will start making they said oh i know what he's going to do next now that he's at 13 seconds he's going to start pulling him off the screen there's and you're you're almost right there's one thing you need to do first because if i pull it off the screen now what what that's telling after effects to do is that from two and a half seconds to 14 seconds or 13 wherever i am start slowly over 13 seconds time pulling it off the screen because it came to two and a half seconds and stopped and it stays there until you tell it to do something else but if the next thing you tell it to do is start going off the screen it doesn't know to start going off the screen at 13 seconds it just says by the time you get to 13 seconds it should be off the screen so we have to do something first we have to duplicate the last keyframe for each layer at this spot to say don't do anything from two and a half seconds to now then you can start animating going off so all we have to do to duplicate that keyframe these last three frames is there's a keyframe button all the way to the left of your timeline at the bottom here let me zoom in so you can see it there's this little keyframe click click and click so now i've set three key frames at that spot so what that tells it to do in this spot is from wherever you start it and end it at two and a half seconds or two and a quarter seconds don't do anything different until this spot that's what that meant so now we can start animating off the screen so we can start saying from here i can say by the time it gets to maybe um here the first one will start to go off and keep in mind um it's it's really the amount of time it's going to take for two seconds for these to go off so that seems like a long time so maybe you want to set those three keyframes in 14 seconds and animate them off quick and by the way you can pick up keyframes so if i said no i changed my mind i want to pick them up move them over then you pick them up and move them over you can move them over or delete them or undo them and reset them any way you want to get them over to this spot in time so i'm just going to pick them up move them and say yeah now two seconds to animate off is too long i want to animate off within a second all right so now that i got them in place in other words go here and stop i just want to make sure i got them all lined up i think i do all right so now we're going to start animating them off we're going to start saying okay a little bit past 14 seconds since facebook was the last one to come on let's let's make it the first one to go off so now it's off and then we're going to say a few less than a second over we're going to have twitter go off all right and then last but not least near the end or right at the end we're going to have instagram go off just hold down shift key to move it over as long as it's off screen it doesn't matter how far but if you move it way off screen then you're telling that's how much time it's going to take to move that far so it might move quicker or slower than you want okay so here's the whole animation playing from the beginning i go all the way pull the time head all the way back to the beginning hit the space bar all three come on and all three just sit there for 13 or 14 seconds or so and then once we get to that first keyframe where they're locked in place then they start animating off quickly because we told to animate off in a second then it starts playing the animation over again so that's it that's our animation now of course you can still move them you can move these keyframes you can say well that they went off so quickly maybe i don't want them to go off that far that fast so i can select all three keyframes move them over and then spread this time out maybe i say you know that let's give it a little bit more time in between them before they go off so now going going off the screen would look like this yeah they don't go off as fast so the key frames represent a position in time literally in this case a position in time how how close they are together is how fast they move how far apart they are is how slow they move and you can dictate that even after the fact like i just did by moving the key frames on the timeline where you want them to be so just like we started with three keyframes locking the position off screen then we move them on screen then we lock the position on screen then we move them off screen so that's our full animation now the question is now we got our slick animation ready to go how do we get this out of after effects so that we can use it in other programs maybe you want to use it in premiere pro maybe you want to use it on your live streaming platform obs or wirecast maybe you want to use it on your meeting platform however you want to use this video there's one caveat you want this video to be transparent so that when you put it on top of other video we don't see a black background we don't see any background at all just like we started with a transparent layer in photoshop that's why we did transparent instead of white so what we're going to do is we're going to do one thing we're going to go to composition and we're gonna go to um we're gonna go to add to adobe media encoder queue so adobe media encoder is a separate application that comes with premiere and after effects so you already have it and what that does is it takes the animation we just did and gives it to us in the media encoder so that we can and it just popped up here's a media encoder so that we can dictate what format what how many formats we want you can duplicate it in here you can export it as many different ways as many different sizes as you need so if i had a 4k one but i needed one for 1080p i could make scale it down one for 720p i could scale it down so i start with the biggest one and just keep animating or scaling exporting it out in different sizes i should say now what format should you use mine's already set you might be tempted to say well i know h.264 is one that i've heard of and and and it could be the one that you would use for any other kind of animation but in this case we're going to use quicktime now if you were the reason we're going to use quicktime is because just like jpeg doesn't support transparency but ping does when you export out photoshop documents same thing with video there not every format supports transparency so we need a we need a format that would support transparency so we could use um we could certainly use um uh quicktime because it does support transparency if you're on a windows platform i would probably start looking at let me see if i see it here uh targa supports a transparency on the windows platform so if you're on windows look into targa i'm i haven't looked in target in a long time but look look into target i know it supports transparency and if you're on mac let's use quicktime we're going to use this preset which is apple prores 444 with alpha and the with alpha is the important part that's that means transparency so whenever you see the alpha term in one of your export presets presets that means use transparency if you don't see alpha then it may not be using transparency and you end up with a black background even though there was no background to begin with all right so just like you end up with a white background when you try and save out a jpeg in photoshop with transparency it just makes the background white no matter what all right then we can tell it where to put it so i'm just going to go ahead and just click on the name this is dictating where it will be saved so i'm going to save it to that same folder it will automatically save it out as a movie or dot mov file we're going to go ahead and save that and then we just hit the play button up here in the upper right hand corner to actually start the export so when we hit play this is a pretty relatively quick animation so it shouldn't take that long to export or render this out but it's connected to the project because keep in mind this is a separate application so connected to the after effects project and rendered it out just that quickly so the time it takes to render is always based on your machine how fast it is your gpu how much you've done how big your files are what codec you're using how many times you're going to export it all those things matter but in this case 15 seconds should export pretty quickly and that's it so now we have our video file if we go out to the desktop here there's my desktop and actually there's my computer and now let's go to my desktop and if we go to that psd to um to ae folder there's the mov file if i hit space bar to play it there it is playing it and i see my playhead going across and it's gonna there's no audio because we didn't put it on any audio in so it's gonna be a silent movie and then as soon as we get to around 15 seconds it starts to go away and it's done so that video can now be used anywhere video that supports transparency can be used and it's already the right size for hd if you need 4k then you start with a bigger photoshop file so i hope this helps those that were like curious or afraid or thinking that it would be hard to animate a photoshop file it's really not most of your work is in the design in photoshop the animation part's pretty simple because you got a timeline you're just saying like you could start with a fully composited beautiful scene and then you can just go into after effects and pull it all apart at one at zero seconds and then over time animate the layers coming back on whether it's position whether it's opacity whether they're rotating in or spinning in or whether they're coming in at an angle because each time you move it off and move it back on there's a path so you can even use your pen tool in after effects to make curves in that path so there's all kinds of ways to animate um you know techniques you can use there's even presets um for animations that you can have it do like ghost effects and sparkle effects that are already there but that was the quickest easiest way to show you how to get started animating your photoshop files in after effects cheers everybody thanks for watching catch you on the next one bye everybody

Channel: Terry White

Views: 11,305

Keywords: Terry White, Animate, Photoshop, After Effects, How-To, timeline, composition, animation, Layers, PSD, getting started, learning, Creative Cloud, Adobe

Id: -y4VIUgiGMc

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021