 Hello everybody, welcome back to another Adobe After Effects tutorial. In this one, I'm going to show you how to animate water using a still image, just like this. If I hit spacebar, you'll see here I've got this water slowly animating and, you know, waving and eddying and all those other words. And then here is an example of the underlying still image that has no animation applied to it. How did I do it? Let me show you. It involves After Effects and Photoshop, a little bit of Photoshop. So let's just start with the Photoshop to get the image ready. Here we go. Over to Photoshop, I've got an image here and I've got this nice lady and she's just sort of hanging out underwater doing her thing. What we want to do is we want to select this subject, we want to cut her out and we want to have a second copy. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to go click on the layer, head up to select and then go to select subject. When we do that, it selects her and it does a very, very, very good job actually. Photoshop's come a long way. But it's not perfect. So we'll go quickly over here to the left side. We're going to grab the quick selection tool. Then I'm going to hold down the Alt or the Option key on my Mac, Alt on a PC, Option on a Mac. And I'm just going to get rid of some of this stuff here that is obviously not her hair. So it's not detecting it perfectly. But other than that, it's done a very, very, very good job. And for brevity, I'm going to go quickly here and just select and mask this. So the next step here, I'm going to make sure I'm selected on this. You'll see a button down here. It says add layer mask, left click on that and presto. We've basically, we've taken her out of the image and we've got a transparent background. Beauty. Now we're going to export this because we're going to use this. So we're going to go to file, export, export as, and we do not want a JPEG. It's usually set to JPG as default. We want PNG. The reason why it has a transparent background or an alpha channel. So we're going to click on export. We're going to call it water or something like that. Water, water wings. Why not? Okay. And we'll put it in our pictures folder and click on save and presto. That's all we need to do for now with Photoshop. Now let's get into the After Effects component switching over to After Effects. You'll see here that I've done it already, but I'm going to show you step by step so you guys can see the exact process that I went through. So the first step, we're going to go to our Finder or your Windows Explorer and we're going to go to our pictures folder and I'm going to grab the water image. So this is the original image. Drag and drop that into the project. Now click on it and drag and drop it on top of new composition here. The reason why you want to do it that way is the new composition will have the exact aspect ratio and the exact size of the image. So that's what we're working with. Okay, good. Let's go back to Finder and now we're going to grab the image that we just made. It's called water wings. Drag and drop that on top. Now this has a transparent background like I said. So we're going to grab this and we're going to put it on top of the previous image. And if you'll see here, it doesn't do anything to start. But watch this. When I turn the bottom layer off, you'll see this has a black background, which is what we want. And that's a transparent background. It just shows up as black. Okay, good. Now we're on our way. So the first step now is we're going to go to our Effects and Presets and we're going to grab the Turbulent Displace Effect. This is the one that's going to do the heavy lifting for us. So grab it. You can just type it in here, Turbulent. It's under Distort. Grab Turbulent Displace. Drag and drop it, ensuring that you drop it on the bottom image. Not on the top one. It's very important. Drop it on the bottom image and you'll already see, well you won't see anything yet, but what you want to do is you want to turn the top layer off. So I'm just going to click this little eyeball here, turn it off and you'll already see that it's applied a little bit of a displacement to the bottom. So head up to Effect Controls, making sure you're on the bottom layer. Turbulent Displace has been applied. Now we're going to go ahead and just sort of animate the water nice and simply. So what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to click on, making sure your play hit is at the zero seconds or wherever you want the animation to start. Click on the Amount, click on the Size and for me, click on a little bit of the Evolution. These are the three that I like to use. You can go ahead and play with them and get the effect that you want, but let me show you. So the first one is Amount. So I'm going to click on that. It defaults to 50. So we're going to start at that 50 at the zero seconds and then let's say at the three second mark, we want it to change to 100 and for this one, we're going to 100 and let's go to 150. We're just going to go up 100 or so. So there we go. We've got 100 and it's animated. I clicked on that stopwatch because this is an animation. Now before I go any further, I'm going to hit the U on my keyboard and the reason why I do that is that shows me my key frames. So here you'll see here that we've got an amount of 150 and when I move it to the beginning, the amount of 50. So already you can see that we've applied a subtle animation to the water. That might be all you need to do, but I will show you a little more just in case. So we've animated the size as well. So making sure your play is at the zero seconds, go up to the three second mark, hold down the shift key because that way you will then magnetize to the already the first key frame here and then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go, let's do the size. We're going to increase the size to about 120 or 115 because it's quite a strong effect, 116, whatever, something like that. So you'll see here that it's applying the size to it. It's starting to get that organic feel to it. The same thing with evolution, starting at zero, going to the three second mark and let's add in about 30 degrees or so of evolution as well. Now it doesn't quite look right yet as you can see here, but watch this. When I turn the top layer on, I hit the eyeball here, now when I hit spacebar, the water has that animated motion effect to it and the lady in the lake or in the water does not. So this is how you animate water inside After Effects using a still image or photo. Thanks for watching. Timer stuff coming up.