RGB Split In After Effects _ Chromatic Aberration Tutorial

In this video, you're going to learn how to create a basic RGB split without any plugins and then use those techniques to create some really neat interesting effects all inside After Effects. Let's not mess around, we've seen RGB splits before. Here's how to make one quickly without plugins and of course the project file for this is free to download in the description as well. So run a new comp here and I'm going to drag in a footage comp, which is just a comp I've made for the few elements so that we can really see what's going on. And later we can replace this for any footage you like. Now the first thing we're going to add to our footage is the effect shift channels and this lets you manipulate the color channels of your comp or layer and we're going to use it to isolate the red, green and blue channels. So we want to take the red from red but we want to take the green from full off and the blue from full off. So now we're only getting the red channel from this layer and we're going to duplicate this two more times with command or ctrl d and I'm going to rename these footage red, footage green and footage blue and let's color code those as well because we deserve it. And of course we always label our layers. So the red we've done, isolated the red channel, let's hide that. For green we just need to change this effect from taking the red to red to full off, change the green to green and then we've just got the green channel. And then the same thing for the blue, turn the red off and take the blue channel from blue. So now we've got the blue channel isolated, the green channel isolated and the red channel isolated. Now at the moment we can only see the top comp which is red but if we change their blending modes from normal to add, now we get our original image because all of the color values added together turn into this image. But if we grab any one of them, say the red channel and drag that around, you can see that it separates and we get some variance in the colors underneath. So let's select them all and let's just open up our align tool so we can align them back to the middle and we're just going to select a layer and nudge it with our arrow tools to move it subtly to the left or right or up or down. You can do it in a little triangle position if you move the red layer up a bit to the left, maybe the blue one up a bit to the right. So now if we zoom in we can see the color is splitting on all sides of our text and again you can go more extreme with this, you can pull these out much further and you can even animate these moving around and shaking if you want to get a more of a glitchy effect. One way I like to use this is to be really subtle and this aligns back to the middle and just move the red layer up a tiny bit and the blue layer down a tiny bit as well. So you just get a slight bit of yellow and red at the top and a bit of cyan and blue at the bottom and this is really subtle, it's barely noticeable but you can still see that somehow our footage is being affected. Now I really like this look, I'm all about adding subtle textures and effects to make my animations look sort of just less out of the box, less lying against just a vector animation in After Effects and if you're not trying to make it look super textured and crafty, adding a really subtle chromatic aberration which is what this is creating by creating an RGB split to make your footage make it look like it was captured from in between screen or something else, just a little bit extra that separates the audience from your animation. Hold up, okay this is editor Ben here and I'm recording this after the main tutorial because I forgot to include one pivotal technique and that is with some blur but not just regular blur, we're going to use a directional blur. So let's add that effect to our footage red, let's put that blur length up to something maybe around 10, there we are and let's copy that and paste that on our blue footage as well and now we get a nice subtle gradient between all of our colors and let's actually, let's paste it onto our green layer as well so we get all the colors, there we are. So now we get that full gradient from black to the red channel where we get the yellow and orange and then blue then back to black. Now obviously using a blur will make your footage blurrier and the reason we're not using a Gaussian blur or a fast blur, we're using a directional blur is so that we can sort of control that. So now it's blurrier but only in one direction so it's half as blurry as it would be if we were blurring it left to right as well and this mimics I think more realistically the chromatic aberration kind of look you'd get with an old CRT screen or something similar. Anyway that was just a little bonus technique, editor Ben out. Now of course we can go into our footage layer and add any video layer to it, let's go in and add my YouTube intro. Now if we go into our main layer we can see that the RGB split is affecting this as well. Now in full color animation like this, this is going to be pretty subtle on these colored layers so you nudge these a little bit further to exaggerate the effect in this case. That's completely up to you. Another way you can distort these is by using optics compensation. So let's align these back to the middle and let's scrub over to an area like this and then on the red channel I'm going to add the effect optics compensation. I'm going to select reverse lens distortion and I'm going to increase the field of view and you can see what this is doing is sort of warping it out from the middle. So the outside of our comp is distorted a lot more than the inside. Inside there's barely any splitting but as we get further out we can see the channel splits even further. So we can add something subtle like maybe 15 for this red channel. Let's copy that effect and paste that onto our green layer and then we can increase the field of view a little bit more. So now we have it only splitting at the very edge. That might be a bit too much, we can maybe turn that down a little bit. You'll notice this technique used a lot in films and video games as well to kind of replicate what you might get from a camera lens under certain circumstances. Now that we know those principles let's create a really cool animation like this. And if you're enjoying this video please give it a like and consider subscribing that really helps me grow the channel and keeps me able to produce videos like this every single week. But first a bit about this video's sponsor Skillshare. 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The first 1000 people to use the link in the description will get a free trial of Skillshare premium membership so you can explore your creativity. I'm going to start a new comp select the ellipse tool change its fill to red and make sure it is a hundred percent red which is 255 on the red channel click okay I'm just going to draw a circle in the middle let's make sure it is aligned to the exact center and again let's duplicate that twice make one circle 100% green just making sure we have 255 in green and zero on red and then the last one blue and again set their blending mode to add and together those three colors will make white. We're going to animate their position so let's open that up by pressing p on our keyboard keyframe it at the very start and at the end of this comp which is 40 frames long I'm going to keep it in their position again and then in the middle I'm going to select each one and drag it out from the center a little while there so now they're animated coming out from the center and bouncing back in and you can see very clearly how these colors interact where all three of them overlap we get pure white or two of them overlap we get a new color so red and green we get yellow green and blue we get cyan and red and blue we get magenta so we have cyan magenta and yellow the cmy in cmyk and this is pretty much how the visual light spectrum works but we're just here to make a cool animation so let's not dwell too much on that to make this animation a bit more interesting let's add a rotation so I'm going to do that by adding a new null object select all of these circles parent them to that null which is in the very center of this comp I'm going to keyframe its rotation at zero and then at the end of the comp one full rotation which is 360 degrees so now when we play they rotate as they spin out and back in so let's select all of those keyframes and press f9 to easy ease them so we get a nice smoother animation now we're going to add a cool blur effect and we're going to do that on a new adjustment layer so I want to create a new one with ctrl alt y and I'm going to call that blur and now we're going to add the effect cc radial fast blur and that instantly gives it a really cool glow and we're going to add a few glows so this first one I'm going to make a bit more subtle so it has an amount of 30 so it's really tight to our shapes then duplicate it again with command or ctrl d increase this one to 50 and then duplicate it again and increase this one way up to 85 and let's see how that looks there that is looking really cool and we get this really nice interaction where the layers meet and are blurred together and because the blending mode is set to add all these colors are additive we won't get any muddy grays or browns as they blend together now adding these multiple radial fast blurs isn't entirely necessary this just helps to give it a softer look if we remove these first two that we added we can still see that as a cool effect and you can see the shape of the circles a little more clearly so use that if you prefer but I think I like a softer glow and this looks pretty cool and slick but let's make it a bit more crazy so we're going to hide that blur adjustment layer and add a new adjustment layer and call this one warp because we are going to add some distortion effects and the first one we're going to add is wave warp and that just adds a wave to our animation but we are going to tweak some settings to make it more interesting we're going to change its height to 60 its width to 100 and let's turn that blur adjustment layer back on as well and then chuck our warp underneath it and now we can see we get a lot more straight lines and clear cut edges because of that radial blur is encountering a lot more sharp angles that are in line with the center and this can look interesting if you like that but I think we can do a few more things like change the wave type from sine to square and you'll get these nice blocky chunks and I really like this mixture of the soft glows the round shapes and then these harsh lines splitting it up let's try something else let's turn off that wave warp and let's actually turn off that blur as well while we're here and add the effect turbulent displace we're going to set the amount way up from 50 to 600 and the size down to 25 so this is warping our layer a lot and we get these little islands of colors so we get a little island of red here and that is going to make a really interesting effect when we add our blur effect because it is going to blur each of these out away from the center we get this really cool burst of light effect which kind of looks like a star collapsing that you might see maybe on an epic anime or dr phil and actually let's animate this turbulent displace as well so let's alt or option click the evolution stopwatch to open up the expressions window and type in simple expression time asterisks 100 which will just keep this turbulent displace animating at a constant speed so now we get some nice light flashes coming in here there that is looking really nice and we can also add that wave warp back on to add more complexity so now we get more lines happening in here and we can even drag the wave warp after the turbulent displace to get a different effect in our layer stack we've also changed the turbulent displace from turbulent to horizontal displacement so now it's blurring this combination of sort of horizontal rectangular shapes rather than circular and it looks maybe a bit more digital and without a blur it does look like a complete mess so that blur is really helping us here and radial blur is really great in these scenarios and the reason i've separated the warp and blur onto different adjustment layers is so that we can easily play and change the order that they're in we can turn one off easily and yeah change the order we can put the warp on top of the blur and we get a completely different result which looks different in its own way and then if we just change the order of our effect stack on this warp adjustment layer putting the turbulent displace on after the wave warp we get a completely different effect which maybe looks like some space age tv distortion so this rgb split effect is a lot of fun to manipulate once you understand how the basic principles work and now adding color channels can make some really interesting effects especially when you blur them and again this project file is available for free to download down in the description take a look tinker around with it and i'd love to see how you apply some of these effects to your own work if you'd like to learn animation and motion design techniques i've got a playlist of some of the best tutorials on this channel for you to take a look at i'll see you in the next one