Applying a photoshop grade to After effects- HELP!

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BWyldeck

Well-known member
After Effects/Photoshop noob here. I need to apply a pre-made photoshop color grade to video in After Effects. It consists of cross processing and vignette layers.
How would I do this?
Many thanks in advance.
 
You can export your video as an image sequence; then set up a photoshop action with the grade/effects you need; and use "batch" to apply the grade to the individual images.

When that's done, open the an image from the sequence with the photoshop "open" command and make sure the "image sequence" button is checked. Choose a frame rate, and then choose "export video" (or "render video?")

Each step of the above can be googled for more specifics. It's not an unusual or groundbreaking thing to do, it's used often to get photoshop specific effects onto footage.
 
BWyldeck said:
After Effects/Photoshop noob here. I need to apply a pre-made photoshop color grade to video in After Effects. It consists of cross processing and vignette layers.
How would I do this?
Many thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

CS4 and presumably CS5, have the ability to work in a limited sense with 'movie' media. They appear similar to 'smart objects', and you can deal with them as you would still 'layers', like adding adjustment layers/filter/whatever on layers above the movie media, just as if it were a still.

I don't believe there are 'keyframe' features in PS, so if your fancy filter produces 'wyrd' results during the playing of the sequence, you may have to cut up the movie into small segments, and adjust parameters for each segment.
 
How did you create the cross process color grade and vignette? What did you do in Photoshop to create this? Curves, levels, hue/sat, B/C? I presume you used a mask in PS for the vignette?

I ask because of two reasons:

• CC done in PS (as in, one frame) may look great on that still, but not look great to the entire AE sequence.

• You may be able to re-create what you did in PS in AE using the same filters. Or just eyeing it.

A LOT of color correction can be done directly in AE to create awesome looks. A lot of people miss out on that, or think they need to have every last Red Giant/Tiffen plug in to do so. While those are often very nice, they don't replace skill, and someone with skill can do wonders in AE.
 
snowleopard said:
A lot of people miss out on that, or think they need to have every last Red Giant/Tiffen plug in to do so. While those are often very nice, they don't replace skill, and someone with skill can do wonders in AE.
Click to expand...

And using levels or curves in AE will generally get you 90% of the way there without even using a three-way. Switch to linear and it gets even prettier.
 
Agree Michael. I do a lot with curves, hue/saturation on adjustment layers, and masks and blending modes. It's most important people understand how to use those tools. And they aren't impossible to figure out, it just takes some practice.
 
That, and animating a soft mask for specific areas (like a face). For gentle highlighting, you don't need a super-accurate painstaking mask; just keep a soft-feathered adjustment layer generally over the region you're dealing with (say, a face or a glint of light on a prop, etc), or to tone-down a distracting spot or background. You can really give a shot some love this way.

You can stack multiple masks to recreate making a complex mask in PS (the kind where you need one area a little hard, but the mask fades slowly in another area). There's a lot of stuff AE does far better than PS when it comes to adjustment layers and masking.
 
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