5.1 Learn How to Mask in After Effects

In this lesson, you are going to learn the basics of Masks. Let me show you some basic examples and you can follow along by opening up the Masks.aep file. If I take my text layer here and I want to use a Mask on this only to show part of the layer. What I can do is grab the Rectangle tool, and click and drag, and I can put a Mask on this layer. Now right now the mask is set to add, which you can see right down here. And so you can see everything in the layer. That's the bounding box of the layer. And because the Mask is larger than my layer, you can see everything inside this Mask. If I change the Masks mode to something like subtract, it does, hopefully what you would expect. The opposite of add, if add is adding the things inside the Mask. Subtract is doing the exact opposite. So once you've created your mask, you can adjust it. However you want to. And you can do something like create a basic text transition with a Mask. Using a little bit of animation. You can move the CTI to, one second. And then in the Mask properties, tungle on the key frame for Mask path. Then bring the CTI, back to the beginning of the comp. And then you can double click on the Mask and just squish it to the left here. Then if you play this, you'll see you have this kind of horizontal wipe. Which is pretty cool. Now there's lots of other ways to do this. But that's just a really simple example of using a Mask. Let me show you another example, I'm gonna create a new composition, I'll call it, Solid Masks, I'm gonna use the HDTV108024 preset. It's set to five seconds long, that's totally fine, and I'm gonna click OK. Now, what I wanna do is I wanna create a solid. So I can do that a number of ways. I can right-click down here and choose New, Solid, and that will create a solid, or you can come up here to the menu and choose Layer, New, Solid. It's also Ctrl+Y on the keyboard. Now I'm gonna pick a color here, maybe something like orange. Like that. Sounds good. And now this time I'm going to create a Mask with the Pen tool. Now I'm gonna create a few different shapes. So right now I have four different Masks on this solid. If you hit M on the keyboard, that'll bring up those Masks. Then you can toggle down the properties for each one or you can hit MM And that will expand all of the Mask properties for all of the Masks you have on your layer. Now by default, when you create a new Mask, it is set to Add. But I wanna show you what happens when you change the Mask mode here. So let's set the second one to Subtract. And maybe the third one to intersect and the fourth one to difference. You can see, you can take that same basic set of Mask shapes and you can get a lot of different looks and variations just by changing the different Mask modes and this is also dependent on their stacking orders. So if you change the stacking order here, you're going to see that the effect is different because the way these Masks work is they affect things that are above them in the stack. And for more information on this, Adobe has a great Help page for After Effects where you could check out some more detailed examples of how all of these Mask modes interact with each other. I'm gonna jump over to my drone shot comp and show you a few more examples of how you might use Masks in actual projects. So let's say, for example, you wanted to punch up this drone shot with a little bit of color and a vignette. Lots of different ways to do that, I'm gonna show you one way using Masks. Again, if you do not have this drone shot, you can download it from Envato Elements. Of if you want, you can pull in any piece of footage into a comp and follow along best you can. If I come up here to my project panel, I actually already have a Black Solid which is what I'm looking for. I can pull that down in my comp. There is no need to make a second Black Solid, I'll just reuse this one. Now what I can do is, I can grab one of the shapes here. And I can click and drag, maybe make a rectangle here. That will work fine and then what I want to do is set this Mask to subtract. And that will create a nice vignette here. It's not very even but it doesn't really matter and then if I press F on the keyboard. That will bring up the Mask feather. Then I can feather this out. And finally I can change the transfer mode or the blending mode to something like Classic Color Burn. And if you don't see the transfer control pane, you can hit this Toggle Switches/Mode button down here. Or use F4 on the keyboard. Then if I hit T on the keyboard, I can adjust the opacity and just maybe wind that down a little bit, because it's just a little heavy handed. Now I can also give this a nice color punch here by grabbing this orange solid that I created earlier and bringing this down, I'll put that below, my block solid. Then I can grab the Pen tool, and just make, a giant triangle. Mabye something like that. Doesn't matter too much. Maybe something, like that. It doesnt matter too much. Maybe something like that. And then I'm gonna hit F again on the keyboard to bring up feather. I'm just gonna feather this out. Quite a bit. Then I'll change the blending mode to something like, soft light or maybe even vivid light ooh that looks pretty cool. And I'll hit T on the keyboard, bring up opacity and maybe dial that effect back just a hair. And then it would be cool to have another color here. So maybe I'll just make another solid. And I'll pick this time kind of a, bright blue or maybe a purple. I like purple. It might be pretty cool. And I'll do the same thing, I'll make just a giant triangle with the Pen tool. Something like that, I'll bring it below my black solid vignette, which I can rename by hitting enter on the keyboard. To vin. And then I'll hit F, to bring up the feathering. Feather that out, a good amount, maybe set that to something like soft light. Hit T on the keyboard and let down a little bit maybe vivid light, nah, hard light, maybe add, I like add. Add works pretty pretty well, but I'll just turn that down a little bit. Adjust that size. There. That's pretty cool. So we went from this, boring to that. Not too bad. May not be to your taste, but it's just to show you some of the things that you can do with Masks. All right, coming up in the next lesson, you're gonna get a quick peek at shape layers and how you can use them to make some really cool looking stuff. So check that out coming up next.