10 Quick After Effects Techniques I LOVE

Now these After Effects techniques that I love  fall into two categories; quick and quicker. So let's not mess about if it fits the style this  can add a lot of extra movement and depth to your animation these are made by creating four  similar brush Strokes with the textured brush in Photoshop then looping them in After Effects  so they change every four frames or so and then applying them where the Shadows or highlights  might appear in your design and using a map or a mask to confine them to just that layer now  you'll have to do this a few times depending on your design but good things come to those who in  the olden times printers used to mess up sometimes not like the reliable bastions of Technology  they are today if I want a retro printed feel I like to misalign the line art of an animation first we need to separate them so we'll take our finished animation add the extract effect and drag the histogram over from the left to remove the dark colored line art and just leave  the colors remaining then duplicate that layer with controller command D and then on that layer  adjust the histogram in the opposite direction to believe just the line art then we can select  any of these layers and move its position about it as much or as little as we want  and some looping texture over the top for good measure too here's an animation I made with  some fancy gradients but I like the ball to really feel shiny and reflect the colors on the  other layers so we can do that by duplicating the layer we want to reflect dragging that over  closer to our object a little bit and adding the set matte effect to it then we're going to take  the mat from our Circle layer and add a gaussian blur and we'll pump that up a fair bit now you can  put the gaussian blur above the set mat and that creates an interesting more stylized effect but  if you want it to look more realistic we'll drag that below our set matte effect and to remove  the blur that is going on outside of the circle we can just duplicate that set matte effect again  with controller command D and drag that below the gaussian blur to restrict it just to that Circle  again and now if we increase the blurriness and maybe just move the shape back a bit we can  see it isn't as visible on the very edges