How To Add Glow In After Effects

Adding glowing lighting effects to your cartoon animations can help brighten an area of your scene and add together emphasis. Thoughtful lighting is besides a way to stylize a compositon. In this tutorial, you will acquire how to create subtle areas of light within a cartoon projection using Adobe Afterward Effects.

What You'll Larn in This Tutorial

After Effects has many different tools that allow you to create lights in your composition. Using a ready made project from Envato Elements,we'll show you step-by-pace how to using lighting to enhance the scene. You'll learn:

How to create a low-cal in Adobe After Effects
How to apply and edit lighting and glows to a scene
How to utilise glow lights for different light sources (e.chiliad. laptops and lamp)
How to enhance the animation even further using Adobe Afterward Effects, controlling lighting furnishings and how it effects different objects in the scene

What Yous'll Need

To follow along with this tutorial you will need your ain version of Adobe After Effects installed on your computer. If y'all've been following our character animation series and want to swap out or adjust the characters further, you might also want Cartoon Animator installed. Check out our tutorial on how to rig characters for blitheness for that part of the workflow.

You will need a scene. We used the following blithe scene from Envato Elements. Click on the link below to download it:

Animated Scene Situation

i. Preparing The Limerick

Step 1

We'll start past choosing the limerick that nosotros want to work in. The project from Envato Elements have 9 scenes that you can choose from. Double click on each composition to open them up and to run into an image preview of what they all look like. Try and pick a scene that has a few dissimilar low-cal sources.

Step 2

For this tutorial we will exist usingScene 08.Notice that information technology has three different light sources in the scene. This includes:

1x Ceiling Lamp
2x Laptop Screens

Step 3

Next we volition demand to create a background for the image.

To exercise this we must open theGroundwork Elements Sceneby double clicking on the layer with your mouse.

Step iv

This will open theBackground Elementscomposition in a new tab for you to explore.

Click on theShy Switchbutton to reveal the hidden layers inside the composition.

Step 5

Now nosotros need to create the colour for our background. To do this we demand to create a new solid by going to Layer > New > Solid.

Step 6

Rename the solid toBackground

Footstep 7

To change the colour of the background, click on the colour box at the lesser and cull a suitable colour. For this tutorial we will be using the colour with lawmaking 3F3061.

Stride 8

We can besides alter the color of the background by adding aFill Consequence. You can practise this by going toEffect > Generate > Fill. This will apply a fill upshot to the solid layer which will allow you to modify the colour of the background whenever you like.

Step nine

Next we volition demand to change the color of the shadow so that it suits the rest of the image. Find the layer for the shadow by investigating each layer. In this instance, the shadow is represented byLayer 9.

Step 10

Make sure that the Layer nine is still selected past clicking on it with the mouse. Add a fill result to the shadow layer by going to Effect > Generate > Fill. This will allow you to modify the colour of the background layer easily by going to theEffect Controls Console.

Footstep 11

Navigate to the Upshot Controls Consolewhich is usually located on the upper left of the screen. You tin can besides open up information technology past going toWindow > Issue Controls.

In the Effect Controls Consolechange the colour of the shadow so that it is slightly darker than the colour of the background. In this example we will utilise the colour 332554