Median | Effects of After Effects

[Music] the median effect can be found under noise and grain and there are actually two instances of this effect one just named median and the other one median with legacy in parentheses there is only one difference between these two effects and it's simply that the legacy version is supported in both 8 and 16 bit color modes but the newer one also supports 32 bits per channel and i can tell that because just right here next to the name is 32 16 or 8. every effect will have this icon next to it letting you know the maximum bit depth that that effect is supported in i can only imagine that they kept this one around for backwards compatibility with older projects but because of that we're only going to be looking at median and ignoring the legacy version alright so i'm going to drag this out onto this photo of a meadow and we only have two controls a radius and then a checkbox so what this effect does is basically looks at every single pixel of the image and then averages out that pixel's values with the surrounding pixels so let me turn up this radius value to show you what i mean as i increase this it very quickly gets kind of washed out and muddy we lose a lot of the detail and as a result we're getting larger blocks of similar colors so if i turn this off and back on you can see these two different horses pretty much become much simpler and blobby now the reason this effect is under the noise and grain category is because it can be used to actually remove noise at low levels so if i turn this down to one and just turn it off and back on yes we are losing a lot of detail here but it's basically getting rid of all of the camera's film grain if i zoom in nice and close and turn that off and back on it's actually doing a pretty good job at that with the trade-off being losing some of that sharpness in detail now there are other grain and noise removal effects and techniques that i would say are probably a better bet and whenever this effect shows up in my workflow it's usually for a stylistic reason so if i just bump this up to two or three we get something that looks a whole lot more like a paint by numbers almost and i could really crank this up to maybe four or five and combine that with maybe a vibrance effect bring that out and just increase the vibrance so that we have much more saturated colors and i could even add on top of that a brush strokes effect zoom in here nice and close and mess with these settings a little bit make the brush size a little bit smaller to get a tighter texture maybe bring that stroke length down maybe increase the stroke density a little so we have just a little more grit there and maybe turn up that stroke randomness a little bit as well so now we just have a little bit more of a textured image this is pretty washed out it does look a little bit blurry so maybe i turn that median down to a four or even a three to bring back some of that detail but there you go just combining it with a couple of different effects gives it that painterly look and if i turn these effects back off and then on again you can see just how easily we're able to convert this into something that looks like it was painted now this has a very different result if you apply it to something like a vector graphic so let me bring out my logo here and i'll just shut off this text layer and i'll actually make a new adjustment layer by going up to layer new adjustment layer and i'll again add the median effect to it so it applies it to not only the logo but also the green background if i increase this just one step at a time not much changes it's nowhere near as drastic because everything is just solid flat colors and remember the way that this is working is by looking at every single pixel and then evaluating the pixels around it based on this radius so currently it's looking at a radius of 10 pixels and finding out what the average colors are so where we're going to notice something that this effect is doing is where two colors meet if i turn this off and back on you can see what it's doing between the dark green and the yellow colors of my logo it's really smoothing them out and even rounding the corners and this is actually a really interesting use of this effect keep in mind this is also taking into account the background so really what's happening here is that it's averaging all of these colors and finding that there's more of this mid-tone background green than the dark green or the yellow and it's just expanding that color into the other colors but we still have this check box operate on alpha so if i actually turn this adjustment layer off and apply median to my logo which has an alpha channel if i solo it we can see through to the background and turn this up i'm going to get some weird black colors bleeding into my logo but if i choose operate on alpha that black is going to turn into transparency so if i dial this back down to a lower number it's not quite as extreme but it's basically rounding out all of the sharp edges and it is bleeding some of the colors into each other as well so for my logo which has a lot of round shapes on it and some overlapping colors it's not really doing me all that good however if i type out some text and i'll just make this the condensed version of this font so i can make it nice and big and i apply medium to it i'll zoom in here and we'll take a look at some of these sharp pointy corners make sure operate on alpha is checked and then increase the radius and immediately you can see the benefit this is a really great effect for rounding out corners of sharp vector graphics if you ever needed to apply round corners to a font or a shape this does a great job now we do have some semi-transparent pixels here to clean that up i'll just add a levels effect drag it out after median and switch this to the alpha channel and i'll just crush this alpha channel a little bit by bringing this left handle in towards the center a little bit and that does make everything a little bit more rough but at 100 it's not very noticeable so there's a couple examples of how you might use the median effect hey thanks for watching if you enjoyed this tutorial then check out the other ones here on my youtube channel and if you like my teaching style then definitely check out my longer form content on skillshare and school of motion and if you want to support more tutorials like this one check out my patreon you can find links for all that stuff in the description of this video [Music]

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 4,068

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: x-m_B8qThhI

Length: 6min 12sec (372 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021