Black Hole Effect

I'm working on a black hole effect for a show I'm doing. Here's a neat little trick using CC Flow :) It could probably use a bulge too.

Looping in After Effects

I have once again been working in the wonderful world of looping animation. This time I'm working in After Effects and have a lot more keyframes to play with. One thing that I noticed is that I can't use a loopIn and loopOut command in the same expression. This would make offsetting much easier so I did a bit of googling.


CreativeCow to the rescue: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/981338

To add an expression to a property in After Effects, simply Alt+Click the stop watch on it.


Here's the expression that works, thank you Kevin Camp:

if (time < key(1).time) loopIn();
if (time >= key(1).time && time <= key(numKeys).time) value;
if (time > key(numKeys).time) loopOut();

Open as Camera Raw

Stumbled on a great little Photoshop trick a wee while ago. I was trying to stack some TIFFs into HDRs and then I wanted to open them with Camera Raw which has much better processing than Photoshop itself (especially it's noise reduction).

So after a bit of consultation with the google machine, I found that if instead of opening an image, you click File then Open As, you can open any image in Camera Raw by selecting the Camera Raw format, regardless of what that image type was originally:

Here's a comparison of a picture I took with my phone: