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Filed under: Motion Graphics •NAB 2010 •NAB 2010 Post •Post Production •Visual Effects •

After Effects CS5

New Effects

In addition to Refine Matte (spun off from the new Roto Brush feature), Digieffects FreeForm, and Apply Color LUT, a trio of simple but useful Color Correction effects adopted from Photoshop adjustment layers have made their way into After Effects CS5:
Vibrance (familiar to users of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as well as the Camera Raw dialog) is a kindler, gentler version of Saturation. It is less prone to clip individual color channels when boosted to high levels, and leaves traces of residual color when turned down. We prefer it to Saturation, and try to remember to reach for it instead of the normal Hue/Saturation effect.

Above left is Saturation = 100; Above right is Vibrance = 100; the original image is at left. Footage courtesy Artbeats/National Parks West.

Black & White is a version of Photoshop’s Black & White adjustment, which allows you to blend the individual strengths of the red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta channels to fine-tune the resulting grayscale image. This result is followed by an optional color tint, which behaves akin to the Tritone effect affecting just the midtones.

To get the most out of the Selective Color effect, it helps to have a background in print, or to at least understand the relationship between RGB primary colors and the intermediate CMY (Cyan Magenta Yellow) colors. When you add colors across from each other on the color wheel, the result is gray. On the other hand, when you subtract a color, it makes the color across from it appear more strong or pure. Selective Color allows you to add or subtract cyan, yellow, magenta, or black from the red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta channels as well as from the whites (highlights), neutrals (midtones), or blacks (shadows). In the example below, we have chosen to operate on the Blacks, and have added Cyan to the shadows. This neutralizes the red in the shadows (see the original image in the Vibrance example above), making them more gray than red, enhancing the resulting contrast.

Although its not new, Levels has also received a nice upgrade in After Effects CS5: Its histogram is in color, akin to what you may have seen in the Camera Raw dialog. This makes it easier, for example, to spot precisely which color channel may be clipping (such as red in the histogram at right), or if there is a color imbalance in the midtones (again looking at the histogram at right, we can see that the shadows have a blue cast while the midtones have a red cast). Knowing the RGB/CMY relationship in the color wheel above will also help you read this histogram (i.e. cyan shows the presence of green plus blue). You can toggle between the new and old display styles by clicking on the histogram display.

New Blending Modes

There are also two new blending modes in After Effects CS5:
Subtract does what you thought Difference did: subtract the color values of one layer from another. However, if the result would be less than zero, Difference wraps around (take an absolute value of the difference) the resulting value and therefore give psychedelic results; Subtract simply drives the resulting colors toward black. If you’re in 32-bpc mode, you will even get negative color values (which you can then turn positive again by putting another layer in Add mode on top, by boosting exposure, etc.).

Difference on the left; Subtract on the right. Footage courtesy Arbeats/Gears and Digital Biz.

Divide is the opposite of Multiply, driving the resulting composite toward white instead of toward black. If you’re not already familiar with node-based editing systems and advanced compositing techniques, it may be hard to imagine a use for Divide, but an area where it really shines is in removing a color cast: Divide a solid color from an image tinted with that color, and the result is an untinted image.

Take an image with a strong color cast (above left), eyedropper the color cast when creating a solid (above right), and place that solid in Divide mode. The result is a removal of that color cast (left). Footage courtesy Artbeats/Industry Scenes.

And There’s More

This preview has just scratched the surface of the new features in After Effects CS5 – for example, there’s native support for AVC-Intra footage, a one-node or two-node switch in the Camera Settings dialog, Live Preview of changes in many modal dialogs (including Interpret Footage, Composition, Camera, and Solid Settings), and many more. A few features have also been cut, including Vector Paint (we’ll miss its wiggly strokes) and Clip Notes (to be replaced by a promising new online service: Adobe CS Review). And for those with old archives they need to open, the cutoff has unfortunately been moved on how old of a project you can import: 6.0 is the oldest through the normal Import menu item; CS4 is the oldest project embedded in a movie which can be read.
One additional positive new feature worth mentioning will be welcomed by owners of newer Mac laptops: shortcut keys to replace some of the vital functions reserved for the numeric keypad:

For a complete list of changes between After Effects CS4 and CS5, we strongly recommend you check out the new features list in the online Help file for After Effects CS5. As mentioned earlier, we are also in the process of creating the 5th edition of Creating Motion Graphics (10th anniversary edition!). All of the new features discussed in this post are covered in the book and/or our After Effects CS5 New Creative Techniques course for lynda.com. And if you have any specific questions, catch us at NAB, on a series of PVC webinars at the end of May, or on the media-motion.tv After Effects list. Enjoy!

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