See how order impacts the look of effects

[lynda.com, You can learn it.] [the following is an excerpt from the training tutorial at lynda.com] [After Effects CC Essential Training with Ian Robinson] >> A lot of times when you layer effects, you're just trying to create a specific look for an idea that you have in your head.

Or maybe you're just trying to spur your creative juices so you can come up with something different.

It's important to understand as you're layering effects, the order in which you apply the effects has a great impact on the final project.

To show you what I mean in this project, we're going to layer some effects to create, kind of a stylized glow edge look, to sort of give this runner a little bit more pop.

So to get started, let's Select the layer 1 in our timeline, and then go up under the Effects panel.

Now when you're looking at Effects, it's important to understand they're divided up into different groups.

And each one of these groups have specific functions.

For example, Blur obviously creates different kinds of blur.

Color Correction is a good place to go, if you wanna change the color.

Matte is great for compositing.

Like if you're doing green screen keying and things like that.

Now since I want to create a style, I'm gonna jump down to the Stylize group.

Under Stylize, let's go ahead and choose Find Edges.

When we apply that effect, notice it automatically pops up the Effects control panel.

Now with this effect set up, I'm looking at the scene realizing, I don't want to make it so withe.

I'd like it to have black as the primary background.

So let's see what happens if we select the Invert check box.

Now this is definitely starting to look a little bit more like what I was hoping for.

The fact that the edges of the lines are all different colors, it's kind of bothering me.

So I'm gonna layer another effect on here.

And I want to deal with the colors.

So I'm gonna up under Effects and go to Color Correction.

And this time, I want to make those colors Black & White.

So I'll go ahead and apply Black & White and now we have a kind of light outlines for our runner.

This looks great.

If I want to go ahead and make an adjustment to how these different elements look, I can start scrubbing through the different parameters of both of the effects.

So I'm gonna click and drag on Blend with Original, and you'll notice, that just controls the intensity of my Find Edges effect.

Now with the Black & White effect, you see, scrub on the different channels, understand it's just gonna adjust the luminance of each of the different types of colors that it's changing to black and white.

So if we click and drag right back to -67, notice, we're bringing down the highlights in the runner here.

So I'm gonna go ahead and drag that down to the left.

Yellows, we can go ahead and drag up to pop or down, you get the general idea.

You can tweak this to get the stylize look that you're looking for.

So far this looks relatively okay.

But I wanna start trying blend it back into the scene. [mac cmd + d, win ctrl + d] In order to do that, I'll go ahead and select Layer1 [mac cmd + d, win ctrl + d] and press Command + D to duplicate the layer.

Now a quick way of turning off the effects, if you have them applied to a different layer, is to select the layer you would like to remove the effects from.

And then go up under the Effect pull down menu and choose Remove all.

Nothing's happened yet, and that's just because I haven't started blending Layer1 back into Layer2.

So I'm gonna click the Toggle switches modes button and change the mode from Normal to Soft Light.

This is gonna knock out a fair amount of the black pixels, but it's gonna allow me to see the glow in highlights.

Now in order to intensify the glow, I want to make sure that I've Layer 1 selected.

Now we can go back up under Effect and Glows under Stylize.

But just in case you don't remember where an Effect is which kind of happens to make quite a bit.

You can go the Effects & Preset panel.

So I'm gonna go ahead and click in here and I'll start typing the word "glow".

And notice there it is, stylize, and it's a 32-bit effects.

So this is kind of cool.

I'm gonna click and drag on the Effect and just drag it right onto Layer1.

When I let go, now I'm getting a nice pop along that edges of my runner.

So if I scrub through my project here, you can see I have created a glow-y stylized edge look for our runner.

And we did this applying multiple effects.

Just to kind of drive home from the point of how applying the effects works, let's add one more effect.

With layer 1 selected, let's go up under Effect and choose Generate.

And this time, I want to generate Lens Flare.

With the Lens Flare set up, I know this kind of cheesy but this is going to illustrate my point.

Let's go ahead and click on this Control handle for the lens flare and move it up to the left, just so it's not quite so dominating the scene.

If we start collapsing the different effects in our Effects control panel by clicking little triangles next to each one of the effects, we can more clearly see the order in which the effects are applied.

So let's change the order.

For example, if I move the Lens Flare up above Black & White, now the Lens Flare is black and white.

Now let's see what happens when we drag the Lens Flare up above Black & White.

Notice it's taken all the color out of the Lens Flare itself.

If I took Find Edges and dragged it towards the bottom of the layer hierarchy, notice now it's finding the edges of the Lens Flare, even after the Glow.

So let's change the Glow and move it down below Find Edges.

Now we've got a glow on our edges end of the Lens Flare, but everything is still kind of black and white.

If I turn off Black & White, we can get the colors of the edges back into the same.

I can continue clicking through all these different options and keep illustrating exactly what it does but I think you get the point.

As you change the order of effects, you're definitely going to create vastly different looks based on how those effects are applied.

They work very much like layers.

You want to look in the Effects control panel and just see how they are applied and work from the top down.