[Darby Edelen]

I think you’re in for a rough road ahead my friend. The only technique I can recommend is similar to what you’re already doing.

Use Select>Color Range… and then apply layer masks to reveal the selections.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Boyd Hawkins] “I want to refine the edges of the image because the hair of the subject I extracted has some background residue that I can’t get rid of”

That’s exactly the sort of scenario where having a layer mask will help you! Remember, white means fully opaque and black means fully transparent in a layer mask, you can adjust the levels (Select the layer mask and go to Image>Adjustments>Levels) of the layer mask to make the gray pixels (semi-transparent) more black or more white.

If the mask needs to be contracted only slightly you can select the layer mask and go to Filter>Other>Minimum and enter a value of 1. This will turn the mask black in areas less than a pixel away from a black pixel (imagine the black areas of the mask bleeding out 1 pixel into the white areas).

Bottom line: the layer mask gives you more flexibility, not less.

[Boyd Hawkins] “it seems like it would be cleaner to work with just the image and transparent background than to have to deal with 2 layers (the base image + the adjustment layer with the mask).”

Now I’m not sure what you mean by the base image and the adjustment layer with the mask. What layers are involved in this project? I highly recommend not merging layers down as this makes it impossible to edit them at an earlier stage (unless you have source duplicates in your PSD, but this can get confusing and cause the PSD to bloat).

If you don’t like working with multiple layers you can ‘Group as New Smart Object’ (select the layers and right click one) to allow you to work with the image as a single layer in your PSD, while still allowing you to ‘Edit…’ (right click the Smart Object) the source layers.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I recommend applying the default Color Correction > Tint effect. Feel free to play with Curves after that, but Tint should give you a perceptually correct B&W image from color footage.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

You can also get a decent looking flag by animating fractal noise and using it as a displacement map.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[tam1955] “whenever I import files from photoshop the layer effects do carry over to AE7?”

The answer to this one isn’t very exciting. It’s because AE7 isn’t aware of Photoshop layer styles, just the underlying layer.

My favorite workaround for this is to group the layer (styles and all) into a new smart object. Then when AE looks at the layer it will treat the layer styles just like any other pixel data in a layer. This technique can get annoying if you have to make a lot of changes to the layer styles, so I recommend it as a last step.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[omnidecay] “I still dont understand the whole .thiscomp.Layer() thing”

If the periods are confusing you I’d recommend looking at other object-oriented programming languages for some insight. It’s a way to access data in an object. In AE many of these objects are predefined with certain data structures, methods and attributes.

For example, thisComp returns a reference to the current composition which contains other data that can be accessed using the period operator:

thisComp.layer(1)

Calls a method layer() that returns the first layer associated with thisComp (the composition where the expression resides).

You could add to this another period operator to access attributes/methods of the returned layer:

thisComp.layer(1).position

Will return the position of the first layer() in thisComp.

For more info try the Adobe AE online help:

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7a35.html

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Boyd Hawkins] “When I have 2 documents open, how do I get a 2nd layers palette visable so I can drag a layer from one palette to the other?”

You don’t need to have 2 layer pallettes open, you drag the layer from the originating document’s layer pallette directly into the display window of the destination document.

[Boyd Hawkins] “Once I have used a mask to crop out the background, is there a way to eliminate the mask and still have a transparent background, as if I extracted the image?”

You right click the layer mask and select “Apply Layer Mask.” Out of curiousity, why do you want to lose the layer mask?

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I think yikesmikes gave you a good answer to your question. But I’ll give you another option as well: select the mask and hit cmd-t (ctrl-t on PC) and you get a standard transform bounding box.

To see the masks on a layer quickly you can hit ‘m’. This will reveal the masks and their ‘Mask Shape’ properties, you can also hit ‘m’ twice rapidly to reveal all of the mask properties.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

If you mean Particle Illusion when you say PI, then I regret to inform you that it’s not a plug-in (although I’ve heard rumor that it may be some day). Particle Illusion is a stand alone application that you can use to produce very cool 2D particle systems. The downside is that you can’t adjust the particles inside of AE, you have to render out an image sequence and import it into AE. Also, while you can fake depth by scaling the particles there isn’t really any depth to a Particle Illusion particle system.

Particular is a plugin and allows you to produce particle systems inside of AE that can interact with layers, emit from lights and more. Most significantly it produces each 2D particle in 3D space, you can orbit around the particle system with an AE camera.

They are both awesome, and useful for different things. You could even use both of them in conjunction if you create an animated particle in Particle Illusion and import it into AE to use as a custom particle for Particular.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Those curves are based on the incoming and outgoing velocities, the keyframe’s influence, its value and its position on the timeline. If you copy a keyframe and paste it, it will maintain the same incoming/outgoing velocities, influence and value. However, you may end up with a different curve if, for example, the keyframe is positioned farther away from the next keyframe.

To maintain the exact same curves you need to have the exact same values for all of the keyframes, and those keyframes need to be the exact same distance from each other on the timeline. Any changes to values, incoming/outgoing velocities, influence or relative position on the timeline will alter the rate of change (the graph curve) of the keyframed value.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA