Compositing

Chapter Contents
1.1 Irotore
1.2 White Balancing
1.3 Color Matching
1.4 Other Color Modifications
1.5 Smoothing
1.6 Overlay
1.7 Flare and Burn
1.8 Blurring
1.9 Softening the Scene
1.10 Bloom
1.11 Color Grading

Introduction
When compositing, you will be given a set of disparate assets and asked to put them together so
that they all feel like they fit in the same environment.

We will be transforming this set of disparate assets into a completed cut.

EXAMPLE 1.1 | An asset before and after compositing

For our example composite, we have 3 assets: the background, layer A, and layer B.

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How to Use After Effects
As many professional compositors use After Effects, we will begin by going over some basic After
Effects skills.

Creating a New Composition and Importing Assets

Create a new project using File > New Project.

Create a composition in this project using Composition > New Composition. The composition
should be in the resolution, size, fps, and duration of your desired output. We suggest a 1920 x
1080 canvas at 24 fps if your output format is not otherwise specified.

Import your assets into the composition by dragging them anywhere onto the After Effect interface
or by selecting File > Import > File.

Note that if you import a png sequence,

a. Be sure that PNG Sequence is checkmarked

b. You may have to manually change the framerate of your png sequence, as it will default to
30 fps. Do this by finding your newly imported png sequence in Window > Project and
right clicking on it. Navigate to Interpret Footage > Main > Main Options > Assume this
frame rate and type in your desired frame rate.

Double click the new composition (which will be visible in Window > Project) to open the
composition editor. Drag elements onto the editor so that they are stacked in your preferred order.

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How to Apply Effects in After Effects
This document will make several references to applying different effects onto your layers.

Finding an Effect
To find the Effects and Presets tab, in which you will find a search bar where you can look
up your desired effect, navigate to Window > Preview > Effects and Presets.

From there, it’s a simple matter of typing in the name of your desired effect and dragging
it onto the layer on which you want it applied!

Modifying the Settings of an Effect

To modify the settings of an effect, navigate to Windows > Effect Controls. There, you
will find a list of customization options for the applied effect.

Changing The Mode of a Layer

In your scene editor, you should see a mode column. If you do not, select the Toggle
Switches/Modes button.

1.1 Irotore
Though a provided animation may be outlined in black, it is often prudent to change the outline
color to a darker version of your scene’s primary color to make the lines stand out less.

Apply the change to color effect to your animation layer.

Match the following settings:

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The from color is the original color of your outline and the to color is the desired color of your
outline.

1.2 White Balancing

White Balancing is when a photo’s colors are neutralized so that it does not appear to be affected
by any particular color of light.

You may notice that the background in Example 1 has a greenish hue. Even if we want the final
result to have a color grade, we still want everything to be neutrally colored when compositing.
Hence, we will white balance all assets.

To white balance:

a. Add the lumetri color effect to your layer.

b. Under Basic Correction > Color there will be an eyedropper tool labeled White Balance.
Select the tool and click on an area of your asset that would be white if there was no
lighting.

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 EXAMPLE 1.2 | An asset before and after white balancing

In this example, where we are white balancing the background, we will select the wall with the
eyedropper tool, as the wall is meant to appear white.

1.3 Color and Value Matching

All of your assets may not look like they belong in the same scene. This is because they have
mismatching values or colors.

EXAMPLE 1.3 | The composition pre-color matching

In order to match the assets in a composition, apply the lumetri color effect to the layer you wish
to change.

To alter the value, use: lumetri color > basic correction > exposure
To alter the color, use: lumetri color > basic correction > temperature/tint

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In general, the animation should be visually distinct from the background. Hence, the animation
layers should be:

a. Lighter than the background if the background is dark, or

b. Darker than the background if the background is light

Objects close to the camera are darker than objects far away from the camera, and thus should
have a lower exposure.

Objects further away from the camera should have less texture and be more affected by
atmospheric fog. To apply this principle when compositing, objects further in the background
should more closely match the color and value of the sky or the primary scene color.

EXAMPLE 1.4 | The composition before and after color matching

Applying these principles to our example, we get:

1.4 Other Color Modifications

You may choose to enhance the animation’s integration into the background by selecting
individual colors with change to color and altering them.

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 EXAMPLE 1.5 | Modifying Colors

In scenes with dramatic lighting, we’d like the characters skin to stand out. Hence, we will
brighten the skin using change to color.

There is a rim light on the character in the foreground. We’d like the rim light to be less saturated
than the shadows, so we’ll make the rim light desaturated.

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Adding a Tint to All Shadows
Many compositors add a tint to the shadows that matches the scene’s primary color grade.

Let’s go over the process of adding a shadow tint, step by step.

EXAMPLE 1.6 | Adding a tint to the shadows

Duplicate the animation layer. Apply a color key effect to the duplicated layer. Isolate the
shadows in the drawing by selecting the shadow colors with color key > key color. Modify the
color tolerance and edge thin so that the color key only affects the shadow colors.

Subsequently apply invert alpha to the duplicated animation layer.

In our example, the duplicated animation layers look like this once these effects are applied.
Essentially, we have selected and isolated all the shadows in the drawing.

Now apply the fill effect to the layer and change the fill color to the desired tint color.
We use a desaturated brown in our example because it complements the red of the intended
final color grade.

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 Reduce the opacity of the tint layer to reduce the strength of this effect as desired. In our
example, we reduced the opacity to 80 percent.

This is our final result.

Changing the Eye Color

Additionally, the base colors of a character’s eyes often stand out in a composited scene due to
their high saturations.

Hence, it can significantly improve scene integration to desaturate the eyes if a heavy color grade
is going to be applied.

EXAMPLE 1.7 | Changing the eye color

Here, we push the character’s blue eyes towards a brown, desaturated color, since the final scene
will be red and a saturated blue would stand out too much.

Although seemingly insignificant, modifying individual colors to better blend into the final scene
is critical to good compositing.
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 EXAMPLE 1.8 | Final composite with and without individual color
modification

To illustrate the importance of modifying individual colors, our example composite is shown
below with and without specific color modifications.

1.5 Smoothing
If you were to zoom in on the animation layers, you will notice that they are anti aliased; i.e. they
are jagged and made of pixelated lines.

EXAMPLE 1.9 | Anti-aliasing in our example animation

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For this step, we suggest you get a free and readily available plug-in called olm smoother, linked
here:

https://olm.co.jp/rd/technology/tools/?lang=en

Add the olm smoother effect to the animation layer you want to alias.

Be sure that your color key is set to the color of the outline, or the smoother will not function!

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 EXAMPLE 1.10 | Smoothing anti-aliasing

1.6 Overlay
Apply a subtle gradient to your cel shaded animation layers to add depth.

a. Duplicate the animation layer.

b. Apply the gradient ramp effect to the duplicated layer and place the start of ramp as close
to the light source as possible. Match the start color to the light source and be sure that B:
(the brightness of the color) is over 50%.

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 Place the end of ramp at the opposite end of the canvas from the start of ramp.
Change the end color to the primary color of the scene, and be sure that B: is below
50%
c. Change the mode of the duplicated layer to overlay.
d. Reduce the opacity of the duplicated layer to prevent the overlay from being too
strong.

The subtle gradation of the overlay is very pretty, but don’t overdo it!

EXAMPLE 1.11 | Composition Before and After Overlays

This is our original image:

We will add the following gradient ramps to it at 50% and 80% opacity respectively.

We will additionally add this gradient ramp to the background and set the opacity to 50%.

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 All of these gradient ramps will create the following effect when the mode of the gradient ramp
layers is changed to overlay.

1.7 Flare and Burn

Apply a subtle gradient over the entire composition to integrate the scene.

Begin by creating a new shape layer of any color using layer > new > solid. Name the first shape
layer Flare.

Duplicate this layer and label it Burn.

Flare
Apply the gradient ramp effect to the Flare layer.

The start color should be the color you want for your scene light. We typically use a dark blue
outdoors (for the sky), a dark yellow for warm scenes, and a dark grey for indoor muted scenes or

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scenes that I’ll be adding a strong color grade to later. The start color should be very dark, with B:
in the 10%-20% range.

The end color should be black.

The start of ramp should be placed as close as possible to the light source, and the end of ramp
should be placed on the opposite side of the canvas.

The Flare layer will look something like this when you are finished.

Change the layer mode to Screen.

Reduce the opacity of the Flare layer. We usually keep it around 20%-50%

Burn
Apply the gradient ramp effect to the Burn layer.

The start color should be the primary color of your scene. The start color should be very light,
with B: in the 65%-90% range.

The end color should be white.

The end of ramp should be placed as close as possible to the light source, and the start of ramp
should be placed on the opposite side of the canvas.

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The Burn layer will look something like this when you are finished.

Change the layer mode to Multiply.

Reduce the opacity of the Multiply layer. We usually keep it around 20%-50%.

Don’t overdo the Flare and Burn either!

EXAMPLE 1.12 | Example composition with flare and burn

1.8 Blurring
In order to draw attention to or away from an element in a scene, other elements may be blurred
out.

Do this by applying the gaussian blur effect to the layer and setting the blurriness to the desired
value.

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 EXAMPLE 1.13 | Blurring a character in the foreground

If you apply gaussian blur to an animation layer, be sure to apply it to its corresponding overlay
layer too!

Precomposing in After Effects

We’ve made a lot of progress already just working with each individual asset! Now we’re going
to work with all the assets together at the same time using a precomposition.

EXAMPLE 1.12 | Progress with the example composition

Precompose all the layers by:

a. Selecting all of the layers in your composition (Click on your top layer, hold shift, and
click on your bottom layer)
b. Right clicking
c. Selecting Precompose. Checkmark “Move all attributes into the new composition” and
name the new composition “Scene Composition”.

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If you ever need to go back to editing your individual assets, just double click “Scene
Composition” on the composition editor.

Continuing, duplicate “Scene Composition” twice.

Name the first duplicate “Soften Scene” and the second duplicate “Bloom”.

1.9 Softening the Scene

How does anime get that “fuzzy” look? We’ll go over the steps below:

a. Change the mode of the “Soften Scene” layer to Lighten.

b. Add a fast box blur effect to the layer.
c. Set blur radius to 5-35 points, depending on how soft you wish for the scene to be.
d. Decrease the opacity of the “Soften Scene” layer. We typically have it at 40% opacity.

EXAMPLE 1.14 | Composition with the softening effect

We will turn the blur radius up to 80 so that you may visualize an extreme example of this
effect at work:

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 1.10 Bloom
In anime, the whites on the screen are often blurry and shiny in order to make them seem like they
are glowing. In this step, we will create that effect.

Move on to the “Bloom” layer.

Add the Gamma/Pedestal/Gain to the layer.

Match the settings to the following screenshot.

This will cause your scene to look somewhat like this:

The non-black areas will glow after this effect is applied. If you wish for more glow, increase the
black stretch. If you wish for less, decrease it.

Apply fast box blur to the layer and increase the blur radius to your desired amount. We increased
it to 10.0 in this demonstration.

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Change the Mode of your layer to Color Dodge and decrease the opacity. We turned our example
Bloom layer opacity down to 30%.

With that, you are finished applying bloom!

EXAMPLE 1.15 | Bloom example

In our example composition, bloom is not visible anywhere due to the darkness of the scene.
Hence, we have opted to show a different example where bloom is more visible.

1.11 Color Grading

Our final step is to color grade the whole composition. Color grading is an advanced discipline, so
we cover an abridged version here.

Create a new adjustment layer with layer > new > adjustment layer. Rename this layer “Color
Grading.

In order to apply a full tint to the scene, as is often done in dramatic anime, change the temperature
and saturation values (which are found under basic correction > color).

To create a red tint, we use the following settings:

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 EXAMPLE 1.16 | Example composition with complete compositing

After these 11 steps, the composition has changed quite a bit!

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Summary
For your convenience, we relist the compositing steps we suggest in this chapter.

Irotore
Apply a change to color effect to the animation layer and lighten the outline color.

White Balancing
Apply a lumetri color effect to the desired layer and use Basic Correction > Color > White Balance to
remove any tint from the scene.

Color Matching
Apply a lumetri color effect to the desired layer and use Basic Correction > Color Exposure to match the
exposure of the assets and Basic Correction > Color > Temperature/Tint to match the colors of the assets.

Other Color Modifications

Apply a change to color effect to the animation layer and alter specific colors to match the scene more
precisely.

Smoothing
Apply the OLM smoother effect to the animation layers and be sure to select the outline color with the color
picker tool.

Overlay
Duplicate the animation layer and change its mode to overlay. Apply a gradient ramp to the layer and turn
down the opacity.

Flare and Burn

Create two new solid layers, apply a gradient ramp to them, and turn down the opacity of the layers. For the
flare layer, switch the layer mode to lighten and create a dark gradient with the gradient ramp. For the burn
layer, switch the layer mode to multiply and create a light gradient with the gradient ramp.

Blurring
Apply gaussian blur to the desired layer. Be sure to also apply the gaussian blur to the overlay layer!

Precompose the entire scene

Softening the Scene

Duplicate the precomposition. Switch the duplicate to lighten, add a fast box blur to the layer, and set the
blur radius to a value between 5 and 35 points. Reduce the opacity of this layer.

Bloom
Duplicate the precomposition. Apply gamma/gain/pedestal to the duplicate and darken the bloom layer with
this effect until only the highlights are visible. Apply a fast box blur to the layer and switch the mode to
Color Dodge. Reduce the opacity of this layer.

Color Grading

Create a new adjustment layer. Apply a lumetri color effect to the layer and use Basic Correction > Color >
Temperature/Tint to change the scene to the desired color.

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