[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

A real reflection is a more complex thing. Especially on a glass surface (the light blue color implies glass), it is closer to the Lighten mode than Normal blend mode. Dark colors actually hardly reflect at all unless the background you see through the glass is dark. So having two different transparency values is not going to look odd, quite the contrary.

If you’d like to get closer to a real reflection (a glass surface), you could make two reflection layers, one at 85% opacity in Lighten mode and another one at 15% opacity in Normal mode, that would be more like it. Also, glass doesn’t have that much fall-off, so the reflection would essentially be the same opacity throughout rather than fading off at the bottom. Maybe a slight fade, but nowhere near this much.

Metallic reflection would be another matter.

Although I don’t know that realism is even the main objective here, basically going for a pleasing-looking image.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Once you have your white logo on a layer in the document with the red background on another layer, you can select the text area by control-clicking (PC) the layer thumbnail in the layers palette, then invert the selection and set that selection as the layer mask for the red layer. Then you can hide or delete the white logo layer.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Select all in text box, copy, create new text layer by clicking, paste.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

“once it reaches 90 revolutions, the noise stops evolving”

I’ll be damned, so it does. That looks like a bug. It doesn’t evolve even with cycle revolutions.

Well, then there is a need for this workaround.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

… however, looking at your original question again, I suspect a misunderstanding with the fractal noise settings: the “Cycle in revolutions” simply means how many full revolutions (on the Evolution setting) it takes before the noise cycles, it doesn’t mean you can only cycle only that many times. You can keep going endlessly on the evolution/cycling itself, but that control tells you when it will cycle (= every X full revolutions, the “X” being controlled by that number that you can set to 0-88.)

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Let’s say the value at which you want the footage to loop is 1234 (arbitrary number here, actual number depends on you comp and where the seamless loop point is in your comp).

So if you use the expression

time*100 % 1234

the time*100 value will cycle from 0 to 1234.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Perhaps a better question is: What is it that you want to achieve?

1000 layers is pretty extravagant, especially if 500 of them are there just to hold one checkbox each.

Do you want to control all 500 layers independently (and manually) or do you need to control one layer at a time?

For instance, if you just need to pick one layer at a time so that just one of the layers has the y value of 1080 at a given time, a Layer Control would be a better approach than 500 separate checkboxes on 500 layers.

(I figured out a way to essentially do what you are asking, but it seems highly doubtful this is actually the way you want to do it.)

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

One approach to do this is to make all the images anchored frames, which makes them move like text (and with the text). Thus, if you insert a new picture, everything from there on out will be shifted forward to make space for the new image.

A relatively easy way to make an anchored frame is to import the image to the pasteboard (area outside the page), size it, then select the image’s containing box, switch to the text tool, select the insertion point in the text box and paste.

If you need captions for the images, you can make them in a separate text box (while still on the pasteboard), group it with the image and then copy the group as a whole, and paste into text as anchored image.

To make life easier, you could have a master set of pre-sized image boxes (and text boxes, if needed) on the pasteboard that you copy before importing images into them.

There may be complications if you are using different size images, as they won’t necessarily fit onto the new pages as they reflow.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You’ll need the texture as a black and white image. The preferable image would be full range (black to white), as opposed to very light or very dark.

When you have the texture, you should be able to place it in front of you flat background color, behind the text and change the blending mode to overlay or soft light. May need to adjust the opacity as well.

There is another effect, a vignette (darkening toward the edges/corners) on the background as well, which you could either do directly on your background color as a radial gradient or on a separate layer as an overlay.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Apply the tracking results to a null and pick whip the null’s scale property.