Exclude from Adjustment Layer?

[Ocean Byrne]

I’m afraid I’m going to have to take issue with your normally sage like advice Dave. (I still love you though)

I have several adjustment layers, cause it makes sense. One layer does a turbulent displace on everything below. The next one has an inverted feathered radial mask and blurs out the edges. A duplicate of this layer does so a little less, and lives above the other regular layers that need to stay more crisp and live above the previous edgeblurrerer. Then there is a glow adjustment layer, and a levels adjustment layer. I suppose these two effects could be on the same layer easy enough, but I like having them separate, and labeled in the comp, and when you hit “u” you only see the relevant keyframes instead of a bunch you don’t currently care about…

I can certainly see there is potential to get in to trouble with adjustment layers, but I quite like them and see no reason to use them only when I have to.

The copy/paste approach of putting the same effect on multiple layers has lots of potential issues too. A- I have a lot of layers. B- Some of them use a trackmatte from the layer above which would not play nice with the blurring effect. C- when you go to fine tune your effect, you have to make your adjustments on every layer, or set up pickwhip links, which are cool, and a good way to link stuff between precomps too, but when you’re dealing with multiple layers, some of which have Particular on them with a ton of animated channels, and you got a camera, and nulls helping to move it…, pickwhipping it good doesn’t sound so appealing.

Nowhere near as appealing as being able to say, this one layer here, exclude it from the Adjustment layers A, B, and F…

[Roei Tzoref]

I understand the frustration and the need for one or two layers to be excluded. Unfortunately there is no way of doing this without precomping into different composites. If layer based compositing is too limited for you maybe you should see if node based is more appealing.

Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials

[Cassius Marques]

I usually have to do this sort of thing (to some extent it works)

The workflow, once you get used to it, doens’t take too long. I have a shortcut (for a script) that duplicates the layer and links every property (like an instance of the layer). Then I precomp this along with any cameras and use it as an alpha matte for the adjustments.

You said you want the layer below some other things. When I need to solve this I usually “instance” those things too and tint them black. Tint the layers I want white. And use the precomp as an inverted luma instead.

Its not pretty, but it does the job.

Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com

[Ocean Byrne]

You have a script that creates a linked instance duplicate of a layer?

It duplicates and links all aspects of the layer, not just pos/rot/scale, but layer effects, and effect effects like Particular with it’s 80 some parameters and links every one of them to follow their daddy?

Do please tell me you have such a script, and where I can find it…?

Please let it be so!!!

[Cassius Marques]

Yes it does, you can get it here:Duplicate with Connections

Just keep in mind that there are some properties of some effects (particular included) that can’t be referenced, though those usually can’t be animated too. But TC’s particular usually works well with the script.

Cassius Marques
http://www.zapfilmes.com