“ChOps” – Channel Operations, where you process individual color channels of an image (including the alpha channel) – is considered a Kung-Fu skill of advanced Photoshop users.

After Effects also happens to have a number of plug-in effects that give you access to those individual channels. In the next few installments of our Classic Course series, we’re going to look at a few of them.

We’re going to start with the power Channel Combiner effect. In this short overview movie, we’ll give you a taste for its power, from using it to create better grayscale images from a color original, to changing alpha channel types, to processing images using different color spaces, to its ability to look at a second layer as part of its processing:

These movies previously appeared in our Insight Into Effects course on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired that course from their library, so we’re making them available publicly for free.