>>ALAN: As a bonus tutorial, I want to talk about how we can use
photoshop documents - or PSDs - inside of After Effects.
This is really important because a lot of times, clients will give you PSD files to work with
as you start to animate. After Effects and Photoshop communicate with each other really well.
We can actually import entire PSDs into our Project panel and animate them per layer. For
those of you that know how to create in Photoshop, this will potentially be really freeing for you;
you can create and design all sorts of stuff in the proper design program, like Photoshop,
and then bring that into After Effects and breathe life into your layers. So let's break this down.
Let's talk about using PSDs inside of After Effects.
Inside Photoshop, I've designed a PSD for a background for a project. It consists of four
separate present layers, a table layer,
a background shadow, and a background. Now I've designed this in Photoshop because Photoshop is
primarily a design tool -unlike After Effects - and so if we take some time and design
something in Photoshop, wouldn't it be nice if we could bring it into After Effects,
layers and all? Well, we can. So let's jump over to After Effects and see how we can do this.
Inside of After Effects, we're going to import a PSD just like we would any other piece of media.
So I'm going to double-click my Project panel, I'm going to choose my PSD here -- go ahead and hit
"Import." Now, it's tempting to just click "Ok" on this next screen because we normally
do when we're faced with random pop-ups when we're importing, but this is very important. In fact,
your decision on this popup will make or break whether this PSD works inside of After Effects.
When it says "Import Kind" -- sometimes this defaults to "Footage."
We don't want "Footage!" Importing it as footage will basically flatten the PSD and you won't be
able to work with its different layers. We want this to import as a "Composition" and we want
to make sure that our layers remain editable - we don't want to merge them into footage.
So we have "Composition" as the import kind and "Editable Layer Styles" as the layer options,
then go ahead and hit "Ok." It imports two things: one, a composition of our PSD that
we'll open here in a second; two, a folder that contains all the layers of my PSD,
including the artboard that it was made on as a composition. So this can get a little confusing.
Let's jump back to Photoshop and see what this did. So we have all of our layers here for our
project but we also have "Artboard 1" as kind of its main folder. So every time we make a
folder inside of our layer panel -- so for example if I wanted the table inside of a group --
this group would then import in After Effects as another composition. The artboard itself
imports as a composition. Why is this important? Well, let's go back to After Effects and see.
If I double-click my "Fun Fact Background" composition that I imported,
look what we're faced with - the "Artboard" comp - which is also here,
inside of my folder of all my layers. So the "Artboard" comp is ultimately the comp we
want to crack open to see what's inside. So if I double-click my "Artboard" comp,
now we're two pre-comps deep. We have our "Fun Fact Background," we have our "Artboard 1," and
then we have all of the layers inside of our project. But this is what's cool about PSDs:
one, we are already familiar with pre-comps so this shouldn't be that confusing to us, but two,
look, now we have the exact PSD that I designed in Photoshop with layers that I can now edit.
So I can animate this to match whatever project I'm working on, but I designed it in Photoshop
first. So those of you that are comfortable in Photoshop, feel free to design and have
some fun in the program and then import your PSDs as compositions inside of After Effects.