How to Animate a Photoshop Illustration in After Effects
In this guide, Ina animates a Photoshop illustration, created by one of our talented digital artists – Nikki. Follow her on Instagram – @nikkinikolaevart – for more amazing work.
Animating Photoshop art can be a great way to give it a little more oomph or export it as a looping GIF.
The great thing about Photoshop is that when you draw, you can group elements, which when uploaded in After Effects automatically transform into separate compositions. In this case, we have the foreground, the texture, the shadow, and the character. The character is actually drawn twice – once as an object in the dark, and once as the light comes on.
Photoshop is a raster-based program, which means that each moving element needs to be on a separate layer. Keep in mind which objects will be moving – make sure they don’t go out from the canvas as this might create gaps in the animation.
As the illustrations in Photoshop are raster files, avoid any deep zooms as the animation will expose the pixels.
For a full breakdown of how Ina animated this Photoshop illustration, see the video.
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