Easy Chromatic Aberration (RGB Split) Effect in Adobe After Effects - Learn in Five

1. Introduction: In this learning five, we're looking at chromatic aberration, also known as an RGB split. While typically a lens flaw in photography, this distortion has become a go to tool for video creators looking to add atmosphere to their work. Let's head into Adobe After Effects and get started. Can't wait to see your class projects. 2. Getting Started: To follow along with this class, you'll need Adobe After Effects. Your class project is to recreate the chromatic aberration look or even use it in your own projects. I'll provide a completed version of the project file on the project and resources page. It might help if you get stuck. And as always, feel free to post your projects to the project gallery. I always love seeing what you create. 3. The Main Lesson: Starting things off, I have a composition with two layers. I have a background layer and a simple animation. I'm just animating in the tracking and the scale. Now let's get started on our chromatic aberration. I'm going to start by selecting both layers, right clicking, and I'm going to go to pre compose. I'll just name it something very simple text precomp. And I'm moving all attributes into the new composition. So now our two layers are living inside that precomp. Now we can take our new precomp and duplicate it twice with Control D. Over in Effects and Presets, we'll search for the shift channel effect, not to be confused with the set channels effect, which is a completely different effect. We'll add that to one of our layers. Now we'll copy that effect. Control C, we'll paste it onto our other precomps. On the first precomp, I'm going to turn take green from and take blue from to fall off, leaving only the red. I'll rename the layer red. On the second precomp, I'll take red from to fall off and take blue from to fall off. I'll rename this layer green. And for the last precomp, we'll do the same thing. Take red from and take green from, we'll turn to fall off and leave only the blue. And we'll rename it, you guessed it blue. Now this step is very important. We need to take our red and green precomps and change the mode to screen. Now the text has turned white again. But what's really happening is all three of these layers are combined together to get our original composition. If you solo each layer, you'll see you have the red, green, and blue channels separate. Now, to create the aberration look, we can bring up the positions of our red and green layers by pressing the P key. Using the arrow keys on my keyboard, I'm going to nudge the red layer over a couple, maybe to 964, and the green, I'm going to nudge down a couple to 544. And right away, you can see we already have the aberration look. But to tie it all together, I'm going to create an adjustment layer and I'll rename this layer lens blur. In the effects and presets, I'm going to look for the camera lens blur effect. We can take our blur radius down to something really subtle, maybe 1%. It makes the aberration look more authentic. It gives off the look that it was actually shot using a camera. Also add a noise tris auto effect. Turn the noise to grain and turn up to lightness to maybe something like five or maybe even 7%. That'll just make it look like we're watching something on film, and it wasn't just computer generated, and that's about it for the aberration look. And finally, just a little bonus tip to finish off the class. This doesn't need to be done on pre comps. If you have video footage or an already exported video, you can use the exact same method to create your aberration on that video footage. That just about sums up this class. I hope you enjoyed it and see you in the next. A 4. Outro: Congratulations, and thank you for making it to the end of the class. I hope you enjoyed it. Now you can post your project to the project gallery. I love seeing the things you create.