Working with photoshop and after effects, Comparative advantages for specific tasks – Adobe After Effects CS4 User Manual
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USING AFTER EFFECTS CS4
Workflows, planning, and setup
Last updated 12/21/2009
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To reveal a file in Adobe Bridge, select a file in the Project panel and choose File
> Reveal In Bridge.
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To use Adobe Bridge to open template projects, choose File
> Browse Template Projects.
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To use Adobe Bridge to browse for animation presets, choose Animation
> Browse Presets.
For video tutorials on using Adobe Bridge, go to the Adobe website:
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More Help topics
Template projects and example projects
Animation presets overview and resources
Working with Photoshop and After Effects
If you use Photoshop to create still images, you can use After Effects to bring those still images together and make them
move and change. In After Effects, you can animate an entire Photoshop image or any of its layers. You can even
animate individual properties of Photoshop images, such as the properties of a layer style.
If you use After Effects to create movies, you can use Photoshop to refine the individual frames of those movies. You
can remove unwanted visual elements, draw on individual frames, or use the superior selection and masking tools in
Photoshop to divide a frame into elements for animation or compositing.
More Help topics
Preparing and importing Photoshop files
3D object layers from Photoshop
Comparative advantages for specific tasks
The strengths of After Effects are in its animation and automation features. This means that After Effects excels at tasks
that can be automated from one frame to another. For example, you can use the motion tracking features of After
Effects to track the motion of a microphone boom, and then automatically apply that same motion to a stroke made
with the Clone Stamp tool. In this manner, you can remove the microphone from every frame of a shot, without having
to paint the microphone out by hand on each frame.
In contrast, Photoshop has excellent tools for painting, drawing, and selecting portions of an image. Tracing a complex
shape to create a mask is much easier with the Photoshop Quick Selection tool or Magnetic Lasso tool than with the
masking tools in After Effects. Rather than hand-drawing a mask on each frame in After Effects, consider doing this
work in Photoshop. Similarly, if you are applying several paint strokes by hand to get rid of dust, consider using the
Photoshop paint tools.
Deciding which application to use for painting depends on the task. Paint strokes in Photoshop directly affect the
pixels of the layer. Paint strokes in After Effects are elements of an effect, each of which can be turned on or off or
modified at any time. If the purpose of applying a paint stroke is to permanently modify a still image, use the
Photoshop paint tools. If you want to have complete control of each paint stroke after you’ve applied it, or if you want
to animate the paint strokes themselves, use the After Effects paint tools.