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Putting Lights on picture of Christmas Tree
Ok, so I’m working on a photo montage, and one picture has the person as a child in front of a Christmas tree. I like adding motion where I can in photo montages, so I thought I would have the Christmas lights blinking on and off. I know after effects somewhat alright, but couldn’t come up with a good way to do this.
I came up with something that worked, but it wasn’t that good, and I know there has to be a better way to do this. Basically what I did was use the generate beam effect, made the size of the beam small to fit the lights on the tree, and then just added a wiggle expression to the opacity. The problem was in duplicating the light. It wasn’t easy this way. I would love a solution that allowed me to create a light, and then be able to duplicate it and change the color easier then this allowed me to do.
Can anyone think of a more practical way to do this. Thanks for any help.
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4 Replies
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Your solution will depend a lot on the source image. Since trees are generally not as bright as the lights on them you might be able to pull a matte for the lights by using either a Stylize > Threshold effect and a garbage matte or by using a Color Correction > Tint and Color Correction > Levels effect with a garbage matte.
To get a good glow on the light you’ll probably want to Blur & Sharpen > Box Blur the matte.
Then if you want to add flickering you could use this matte as a luma track matte for a white solid set to Color Dodge with an evolving Noise & Grain > Fractal Noise effect applied.
That’s one of many possible solutions.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
sounds good, I’ll give it a try. Thanks
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Well, no luck. I say I’m alright with After effects, but I was proven wrong. I’m not really grasping what to do with the matte. I drew a mask around the girl in the picture to pull her out of it. put another copy of the picture under the one with the mask, and used the threshold command. Got good results with the lights I want to glow being white dots. but I don’t really know how to get this to transfer having the real picture’s lights blinking.
Oh well, no big deal. This looked like it was going to work for me and be a good time saver, but can’t wrap my head around it, and it’s probably too hard to explain. Thanks though.
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If you create a white solid layer in your composition below the matte layer and set it to use the matte layer as a Luma Track Matte then the Solid will appear 100% opaque where the matte is white and 0% opaque (100% transparent) where the matte is black.
Here’s Adobe’s support information on track mattes:
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7cf9.html
When you apply a blur to the matte layer it will feather out the transparency.
Now change the blend mode of your solid to Color Dodge. The white spots on the layer will then increase/brighten the color values of the pixels behind it (i.e. the red of the red lights should get brighter).
I suggested the fractal noise as an option for introducing some random flicker to the lights (the black areas of the fractal noise on the white solid will not brighten the pixels behind it).
You may need to tweak the blur, fractal nosie and opacity of the white solid for the results you want.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA
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