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Adjustment layers in Motion?
One of my new favorite tools in Photoshop is the adjustment layer, best described here: https://www.phong.com/tutorials/adjust/. (Yes, I’m just learning Photoshop. 🙂 )It takes a grayscale image as a mask to adjust specific parameters (such as hue, saturation, levels, etc). As soon as I learned how to use this, I thought about how it could be used with Motion’s generators to create a plethora of organic sweeps of color through a video layer, but alas, I can’t find any way to use adjustment layers in Motion in the same way. In fact, when I import a project from Photoshop, it seems to ignore whatever black and white mask I’d created in the adjustment layer. Does Motion have the ability to do adjustment layers?
What’s the best way to achieve that effect in Motion? I’m guessing it’s a matter of duplicating the video clip, adjusting it, and applying the smoke generator to a mask, but I can’t get it to do what I expect it to do. Where can I find a good step by step walkthrough on that?
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3 Replies
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You can mimic an adjustment layer by applying effects (filters, behaviors and masks) to a group containing several layers. You also should check out how to use an image mask, it’s great for masking one layer (or group of layers) with the luma or alpha information of another layer (or group of layers).
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Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net -
Ah… I must have missed that particular Macbreak episode. 😉
I just did some reading on image masks and tinkered with them a bit in Motion. It looks like I can get the effect I’m after by using two layers of the video and apply a black and white effect (such as the smoke generator) as an image mask to the top one. Then I can adjust either video layer separately to achieve the desired effect. Is that what you were suggesting, or is there a cleaner way?
Thanks!
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That’s the general idea – duplicating layers, applying filters, using generators or library content as the source for image masks, and then using blend modes to composite layers together…
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Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net
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