From the course: After Effects for Photography

Import Camera RAW files

From the course: After Effects for Photography

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Import Camera RAW files

- [Instructor] After Effects include support for Camera Raw images, just like Lightroom, Bridge and Photoshop, so you can import raw images directly into your project. And when you do, you'll see the familiar Adobe Camera Raw dialog box. And once you choose your settings, After Effects will then open the image, with the adjustments, and create an XMP Sidecar file, just like the other Adobe apps. Which means that the other apps can also open that raw image with the same settings. So let's take a quick look at the Camera Raw workflow, inside of After Effects. So, inside of After Effects, I'm going to come up to the File menu inside of a new untitled project, let's come down and choose Import, then File, and then on my desktop I'll come up here and choose this Camera Raw file, and then come down and choose Open. The next thing I'll see is the familiar Adobe Camera Raw interface, again the same interface you'll see in the other Adobe apps. So I'll come in here and make some adjustments. So the first thing I'll do is increase the Temperature a little bit here, just to warm this up, so I'll bring this up to about 7550, scroll down a little bit. I'm losing a lot of detail in the shadows down here, so let's come over here to the Shadows, let's increase that to somewhere around 45 or so. Also going to increase the Blacks, as well, maybe up to around 50 or 60, somewhere in that range, so I can now see all this detail showing up. And then down here at the bottom, I like to have my images a little more saturated, so I'll bring the Saturation up a little bit, Vibrance even more, and then just to help define some of the shapes in the clouds here, let's come over to Dehaze and I'll just bring this up to about 18. So again, you can make your adjustments based on the Camera Raw image you're bringing in, and your personal preferences. I like the way this is looking, so I'll come over here and click OK. That's going to import this Camera Raw file into After Effects, and since I did have the Create a Composition check box selected, I'll also get a Composition. And now we can see this showing up in our project. So now if I go out to the Desktop, we'll see that we now have an XMP file, or a Sidecar file, that matches the filename of my Camera Raw image. This means any other Adobe application that I open, where this Sidecar file is present next to the Camera Raw image, that application will be able to open this Camera Raw image with the same settings. And now back in After Effects, if I want to change the Camera Raw Import Settings, I can come over here to the Project Panel, I can select the Camera Raw image, then I'll right click, come down and choose Replace Footage, choose File, and then on the Desktop I'll pick the same Camera Raw image. Come down and choose Open, and now I'll be presented with my dialog box again. And, since the XMP Sidecar exists, next to the Camera Raw image, these are all of the Settings that I just set before. So I can come in here, and make Adjustments, click OK, and the Adjustments will then be applied here, in addition to being updated in the XMP file. And so now that we've covered a range of Import options, next let's take a look at how we can Export our photographs from After Effects.

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