After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 59 - Auto Trace Introduction Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hello everyone buddy Blackford here with
another After Effects cs6 tutorial and
in this tutorial I'm going to be
teaching you about auto trace so have
you ever had one of those days where
basically just feeling really lazy at
work or maybe at home when you're
working on your demo reel or something
like that and you're just like man
I really don't want a rotoscope or I
really don't want to mask out all the
parts of this guy so there's a option in
After Effects that works and does that
for you although it's not like the best
tool ever but sometimes for images that
are crisp and clear and maybe that are
like one color instead of like like this
is one color but I mean this is a whole
bunch of colors this would be hard to
auto trace so there I'll show you the
tool how to do that so it's actually
very easy come up into click on your
layer in the layers panel and I brought
this one out here that has the the
squish that has the transparency there
and go to layer Auto trace and this
pop-up comes up now if you have
something nicely crisp like this you can
use the Alpha which is going to be since
there's transparency on this it's just
going to be the black or if you invert
it it's just going to be the blue parts
the transparent parts so what you want
to do is click on this preview right
here
so you can see what's going on and you
can see that there's different masks
being made there's four of them so let's
click OK
and now I'm going to enable my masks so
you can see and now we've got him masked
out all the way around now why would you
want to do something like this
what's having a mass going to benefit me
on this well let's try copying these
masks onto a solid
let's copy these eyes ctrl C to copy or
you can come up here to edit copy and
create a new solid
eyes you can see where I'm going here
probably paste it in we'll set these to
add yep click off now parent these eyes
to your tear dude here and now I can
move him around and has different
colored eyes nice so there's one example
of why you would do it now suppose you
have an image like I had before in one
of my later tutorials I'm going to hide
this guy and we can go to squish PNG
here and it has the white all around it
all right let's try to auto trace this
because we want to get the white out of
the background well you're using alpha
and the Alpha on this is the whole
entire picture
so you want to come down here into this
drop-down menu and click on luminescence
and now you're getting the different
parts of him being cut out because it's
basing this on the black and white or
the brightness of the image so we can
hit okay now let's open up our masks
here and turn on our masks with that now
we have set these to subtract no not
that one these wants to subtract
see this this mask right here was the
main must have been the main mask so now
we have taken everything out the thing
about I'm using the live trace as you
can see it left a bunch of white and I
mean I'm sure you really don't want that
so a way to get around that is we can
add an effect on called a mat choker and
I'm going to get out I'm going to close
these panels here because I don't I
don't need them anymore close close
close this brushes panel I just had just
was working on certain stuff and there's
in your effects and presets there is if
you type it in Matt choker you get this
one right here and you can go ahead and
drag it onto your image and you can see
it already pretty much got a rid of all
the white even though it's also a little
choppy though so we have to mess around
with the settings on here so if you mess
with the softness I'll just do that real
quick you can see it like softens it out
and then when you mess with the choke
here it's just how much it cuts into the
object so you you just want to mess
around with these settings the gray
level softness just like kind of like
blurs it on the edge as you can see
there it's a little too much kind of
like doesn't look good
so I mean that's that's how you can pull
white out of a out of an image if you're
if you really need to so let's close
this out and then I mean I picked an
image that was easily traced so let me
bring up something that you might think
might be easily traced but it's really
not