Compositing Practice

This was my first time using Adobe After Effects, although I found it relatively easy once I got the hang of it. The task we were given was to composite the middle penguin in the image below onto the rocks in the image of the light house, and to make the completed image look as realistic as possible. We used After Effects in conjunction with Photoshop, in which we used the pen tool to cut around the penguin and then created an alpha channel to copy across into After Effects. An alpha channel means that, unlike a transparent background, the background image still exists but there is now a code in place to tell After Effects to only display the part of the image that was cut around. After copying the penguin and lighthouse images into After Effects, we layered the penguin on top of the image in the desired position and used the Curves effect to change the amount of each hue of light in the penguin layer, matching it up with that in the lighthouse layer, to create the ideal that they were in the same place at the same time. I am very pleased with the image I have produced and feel it looks realistic, especially considering it was my first time doing anything like this.