Animated Images Part 1

Full Video Transcript

Project Overview and Goals

Hey guys, this is Tora Zes for Noble Desktop, and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to create animated images in Adobe After Effects. We're going to be first going into Photoshop and editing this image here. We're going to separate the hot air balloons from the sky and edit the sky so there's no weird cutout gaps where the balloons were.

After that, we're going to import the picture into After Effects, animate the balloons going up and down, and then we're going to put this logo animation into the image as well. We're going to place it kind of peeking right out from this balloon so we can read it but it's sort of hidden too. As you can see, this is what it looks like when we're all completed with this project.

The reason why this is very useful to learn is because it's used virtually everywhere. This technique, the principles of prepping a still image for animation, is essential. You'll see that skill also being used in a lot of projects, and then animating someone's photograph with their logo is also very common. Lastly, let's talk external assets. By the nature of this project, we're going to be using this hot air balloon image right here. There's also an After Effects file set up that I want to share below since we're going to be using a particular text and composition size.

Preparing the Image in Photoshop

So here we are in Photoshop and you can see that I've opened up this balloon picture. I'm going to first show you this is what we're aiming for. When I hide these layers on the right over here, you can see that you can still see the sky behind them. So to be able to get to this point, we're going to have to do some photo editing. Let's head over to the untouched version of this picture.

You can see that I already have it as one background layer. That's really how most images come into Photoshop, or if you're working on a team, most often people will just hand you one solid layer and they'll be like "animate this." So part of your job is learning how to cut it up and set it up for animation in After Effects. I'm going to give you some basic tips on how to get that done.

Selecting and Separating the Balloons

First let's double click on the background to turn it into a regular editable layer. Over here, hold down this magic wand tool, turn to Quick Selection Tool, and I'm going to select all of the blue sky behind the balloon. We're also going to select the foreground. Basically we're trying to select everything that's not these three balloons in there.

Now that everything is selected except for the balloons, let's head up to Select and either Command+X or Ctrl+X depending on your machine. So we've cut out these balloons, and then Command+V or Ctrl+V, we've pasted them right back in. Now I'm going to separate up this layer, the three balloons layer, so each balloon has their own layer.

In After Effects, if this were all together on one layer, this whole piece would actually move up and down like a solid block. But we want to move them individually, so they all need their own separate layer. Also, I want you to note this background that got cut out here—we're going to take care of that.

Creating Individual Balloon Layers

Right back to this, we're going to pick up our Lasso Tool with the L button. Like before, you cut it out with that hotkey Command+X or Ctrl+X, paste it back in Command+V or Ctrl+V. Going to move you over here. When all of these are organized, great, they all have their own layer now. Let's name them. This one is the leftmost balloon, so double click on the words over here and I'm going to put in "left."

Now we're going to hide them all by clicking on this eye, this visibility button here. And now let's get to editing the background. I'm actually going to make a duplicate of this layer just in case something goes wrong so we can head back and have our original layer. In order to do that, I'm going to drag it down here, then we have our duplicate layer.

Using Content Aware Fill

I'm actually going to go over to Select, Modify, Expand because if you look very closely it's not really selecting the whole thing. I'm going to change this expand by five pixels. In fact, I think I want to expand it a little bit more so the whole thing is selected—three pixels. Okay, I think I can work with that.

We're going to go over to Edit, Content Aware Fill. If you've never used Content Aware Fill before, it's actually really cool. On the left shows our selection and on the right shows us after Content Aware Fill does its job, what it's going to look like. You can see it's filled in this area. Yeah, it's not perfect, there are some smudges here we're going to clean up, but for the most part it's pretty good.

This green stuff is a selection of pixels that the program is trying to learn from in order to fill in this gap over here. It's looking around here and saying there's a blue gradient over here, so this needs a blue gradient similar to what we're picking up. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but for purposes of this tutorial it's fine.

If you want to mess around with the settings over here and change your sampling area, that will then change the output over here. Like rectangular, it just grabs it from around. When you hit Custom, it gives you the sampling brush that activates on the left side of the screen, and it's asking you to paint with this brush and paint in the area that you want us to sample from. If you hit Apply, you could keep working in this workspace, the Content Aware Fill, but I'm just going to hit Okay.

Cleaning Up with Spot Healing and Patch Tools

So there is our fill over there. You can tell it's been edited here, but we're going to be fixing that in the next step. Let's just fill in these two as well. Great, we've used Content Aware Fill to fill in the gaps left behind by cutting out the balloons. Now let's collapse these all so they're all in one layer.

Head over to this little Band-Aid icon, hold it down, choose Spot Healing Brush. Use the left and right brackets on your keyboard to get this thing bigger or smaller, this selection brush bigger and smaller. You're just going to run over some of the problem areas with the Spot Healing Brush. We've blurred it out sufficiently.

The last thing that we're going to be doing is heading over here back to where you found the Spot Healing Brush Tool, hold it down, head over to the Patch Tool. What that's going to do—I'll just show you—let's kind of make a shape around our problem area, and then you click on your selection, hold down the button, and you can move that selection around the image. It's going to fill in that area with wherever you're sampling from.

This really works in things like sky or patterns that you can't really tell that they have the same exact sample. Since we have a big blue sky here, it'll work. We've also kind of messed it around enough with the edges so it looks slightly different. There's still some things we could clean up, but for purposes of animating this I think it's fine. Let's get rid of this base layer over here, the very bottom one.

Importing the PSD into After Effects

Now when you save this, Save As and name it something that you're going to recognize, like "hot air balloon," and remember to save it as a PSD. Back here in After Effects, we're going to be importing our PSD file that we now edited and then we're going to be animating. Command or Ctrl+I to start importing.

If it prompts you to choose between Merge Layer Styles or Editable Layer Styles, choose the first because if it merges them, then there's no point to us separating them out. Now that they're imported, go over here to the project panel, double click Hot Air Balloons—in my case it's going to end with a two—and we're inside our PSD.

So this tutorial is running a bit long, so we're going to end this part over here and look out for the second half coming real soon where I'm going to show you how to animate all the pieces together. Yeah, that's how you set up a file for animation in Adobe After Effects. This has been Tora Zes from Noble Desktop.

Part Two: Animating the Balloons

Hey everybody, welcome back. This is the second part of our tutorial on how to animate still images in Adobe After Effects. Like I said, this is the second part, so if you're not sure what's going on, I suggest going back to see the first part of this tutorial to figure out where we're starting at over here. So let's keep going with this project.

Now that we're inside of our composition here, we had double clicked our hot air balloons layer here. It looks like this nickname didn't take, so let's just rename that. Great. I want to show you how the layers are arranged here. They're pretty much the same way. If you grab any of your assets over here, like the layers, I can move it around and we have a nice blue background right underneath it. It was great that we set it up this way.

Creating Position Keyframes

Now we're going to animate it. What we're going to do is I'm going to actually animate the left one first, and then we're just going to repeat the process with all of them. Click on any balloon that you want to animate, hit P for position. Let's animate this left balloon here, we're going to select it and we're going to hit P for position on our keyboard.

Let's hit this stopwatch here. That's going to set a keyframe at the very beginning. Then I'm going to move my playhead about a second and a half in. I'm going to pull my Y-coordinate down here, the vertical component down. Then I'll move it over here, playhead maybe about to three seconds in. I'm actually going to copy Command+C or Ctrl+C my keyframe over here so it actually loops around.

Using Loop Expressions

The last thing that I'm going to do over here is I'm going to Alt+click this stopwatch and I'm going to type in "loopOut." This is a snippet, it's just a little bit of code. We actually have a tutorial on that, but basically we can use this bit of code to automate certain processes. I'm going to put loopOut here.

If we hit play, you can see it's going down, it's going to head right back up, and it should loop again right here. Great, and it dips down again. But I only have three keyframes—it's automatically going on its own. We're actually going to do the same thing with the other two balloons. I'm going to cut ahead, but you get the idea.

One last thing to note: don't do the same exact animation. Offset it maybe by like a half second so they're not all going up and down in sync, because that would look weird. Great, so now we've animated all these balloons. I'm going to select them all with Ctrl or Command+A, close them, and let's get to the text part.

Adding Text Layers

I'm going to go over to Layer, New, Text. We're actually going to have two lines of text. Let me just make sure that it's typing. It looks like it's typing but really small, so let's actually size this up. I'm going to set this real big. The font doesn't matter for this particular exercise. Let's type in maybe like a company name or something.

Let's say we're animating some stock images that a company sent us, and then they provide their logo. Perhaps they'll provide it in a PNG or a vector file—people will send you anything. But you can try to recreate it in After Effects or on your own. Whatever the case is, we're going to try and animate this thing. We're going to put it on two separate layers.

Next up we are going to put in some text. Let's head up to Layer, New, Text. Let's say we are doing this for some local business or company. I just made up a random company name. This will be our company, and I'm going to place this one on the very top of my layer stack.

Layering Text with Balloons

Now this is important because the way that your layers are organized, it's kind of like a deck of cards. If I had put it underneath this middle balloon here, it would get kind of clipped out. You see that? So I'm going to undo that because we are going to save that for our next text layer. Layer, New, Text, and let's put in some tagline. Let's say "Hot Air Balloon Rides."

I'm actually going to shrink this. I'm going to open up my Align tool set here. You don't really have to do this, but to do that I went over to Window, Align, and I'm just going to click this so they are aligned. Great. Now I'm going to take this tagline and I'm going to bring it underneath the middle balloon here. Looks like my layers got jumbled a bit—I was messing around with them before.

Now you see that it's actually hidden behind this balloon over here. The way that these text layers animate in is not such a big deal, but I'm going to show you just quickly how I did this. Let's head over to Effects and Presets on the right hand corner, and I'm going to choose "Fade Up Words." I'm going to drop it onto my timeline here. I'm going to do the same for the tagline. As I scrub through, it automatically animates in. These presets are really great for quick animations.

Creating a Null Object for Group Animation

Okay, we're almost done. I know it's kind of been a long haul. The last thing that we're going to be doing is we're going to animate this all together. We're going to open up a new layer—Layer, New, Null Object. I'm going to actually bring this one up all the way to the top. I'm going to color code it so it's not red, so I won't mix it up with the text.

If you're unfamiliar, a null object essentially is an empty layer, or more accurately it's more like an invisible layer. You can attach different layers to your null invisible layer. It's a bit like a marionette—when you move the main controls, everything attached to it moves as well. So it's good for animating a bunch of layers at once. I'm actually going to scale it up a bit because I can't see it too well.

Parenting Layers to the Null Object

Now that we have a null layer, we're going to select everything, all together. You see this little swirl over here? You want this swirl near the end of the row, and we are going to parent it. We're going to parent this chunk of layers over to our null. What that essentially means is that all of these layers are going to look to this null for direction.

If I open up position and I shift it down, everything moves together. So I'm clicking and dragging and moving these over. One last thing—I'm just going to move these text layers over just a little bit so they start appearing after the zoom in starts.

Animating Scale and Position

Let's open up S for scale, Shift+P for position, so we have position and scale present. Let's hit the stopwatch to set a keyframe for both. I want to essentially follow the letters as they fade in and kind of rise up with the motion. Let's scale this thing up as if we're moving into the picture, and we're going to be using position to keep everything centered.

We're going to keep adjusting our X and Y coordinates. You can do it manually by clicking and dragging everything, but I just prefer this way when I'm being a little more exact. I actually want this to move a little bit slower because it's heading in in one second, so just fiddle. Then finally, the last thing is that I'm animating it moving up a little bit.

We're actually going to push this keyframe out, and then you select everything together. Remember, right-click, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. I've moved this keyframe all the way out to 3 seconds just because I want it to kind of pan upwards like the balloons are rising, but I wanted to do it very slowly. I'm going to actually trim this by hitting N, and let's preview our animation.

Final Thoughts and Applications

Okay, so that's how you can animate a still image. You'll be seeing this technique used pretty much everywhere like I mentioned. Banner ads rely on this method. UX design really uses this a lot—think of motion graphics on an ATM machine. Instagram ads, even some kinds of animatics can use this technique.

Just the prepping image step is also really super useful as you can leverage those skills into animating your own art as well. So yeah, that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to animate still images in Adobe After Effects. If you have any questions or things you want to see in future videos, let us know in the comments. Tell us about any projects you're working on or any topics you'd like us to cover. This has been Tora Zes for Noble Desktop.