Adobe After Effects Tutorials: Learn How to Use Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects Tutorials: Learn How to Use Adobe After Effects
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Finding the Right Adobe After Effects Education

Adobe After Effects has lead the Creative Suite into the production world and made it indispensable. In the professional film and video industry After Effects has become a standard for image control, special effects, and the emerging motion graphics field. After Effects really integrates the modes common to digital animation and brings together both the mastery of imported footage and the creation of new ones in a way that was unthinkable ten years ago. As you can expect, After Effects is both a must know program for those trying to work in the production and post-production world. Unfortunately, it remains one of the more difficult programs to learn and Adobe After Effects tutorials are not always as easy to navigate as they should be. Here is a look at some of the different After Effects tutorials that are out there to help you master some of its specific functions.

Adobe After Effects Keyboard Shortcuts

Getting right into Adobe After Effects means getting to know the interface first and foremost. Interacting with post-production software often means knowing how to use it for creative purposes, rather than just using junky menus. The best way to do this is to begin memorizing the keyboard shortcuts for that program, and the Adobe After Effects keyboard shortcuts are built right in to help you make it a more intuitive software.

Brightening Up Images

Image control often means a lot of things, but in a real way it can deal with the character of the image, such as through color grading, image texture, and even brightening an image. If you are trying to brighten a video image as part of your post-production process then Adobe After Effects is a perfect part of the workflow. Since Adobe After Effects has the ability to bring in outside plug ins, you have the ability to fully brighten video in Adobe After Effects and really alter the way the colors appear and how much contrast is present.

Adobe After Effects Presets

If you are using Adobe After Effects for a lot of the same kinds of jobs, one of the tutorials you will need is about how to use their presets. Adobe After Effects presets are a way of having certain animation features to come on automatically, and there are a lot built right in. This can work just as easily when you are trying to reuse settings that you created as you can actually build and save your own Adobe After Effects Presets.

Color Correction on Single Objects

Color correction is a difficult process for most people, and color grading software like Apple Color will often be difficult when it comes to very specific changes. Adobe After Effects gives you the kind of control over an image that you get with Adobe Photoshop, except here you are able to do it with moving images. An important tutorial deal with the ability to actually isolate a moving object and change its color in Adobe After Effects, even without changing any of the objects around it. This is the perfect type of functionality for After Effects because of its ability to use mattes and the roto brush tool

Distributed Rendering

Most people who work in non-linear video editing have a sense of what rendering is, but in animation software it is much more extensive and time consuming because of the complexity of the layered and software created imagery. Adobe After Effects has its own issues with rendering time, which is why many Adobe After Effects tutorials take a look at how to distribute that rendering process over several computer instead of just one. What this Adobe After Effects distributed rendering does is then cut down on the overall render time because the workload is being shared by multiple machines.

Motion Tracking

The creation of objects and their connection to real life captured objects is done in Adobe After Effects with what is called a motion tracking tool. This allows you to follow the motion of an object and then actually have other objects follow it, or even do things like repair underexposed footage through that motion tracking. This can be a complicated process, but following a step by step After Effects tutorial will get you started enough to begin using it for your own purposes throughout your projects.

This post is part of the series: Adobe After Effects Tutorials

Different tutorials outlining features in Adobe After Effects.

  1. Tutorials Guide for Adobe After Effects
  2. Adobe After Effects Tutorial: Using Photo Motion
  3. Adobe After Effects Tutorial: Exporting
  4. After Effects Tutorial: Basic Keyboard Shortcuts for After Effects