- 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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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.
