Subtitles of the Movie

For those of you familiar with any image editing application such as Photoshop that allows you to clone things, you'll be familiar with the Clone Stamp Tool inside of After Effects because it works in the same exact way. Cloning allows you to do two things very well and I'm going to hold down the Tilde Key over this image of the long road, which you'll find in the Work Files Folder if you'd like to follow along. Let's say that your art director wants you to get rid of this line in the road or to smooth it out or to even add more lines or to add another house right here or more mountains. When you use this tool, you're able to do just that. So you sample the pixels in a part of the image, you move your mouse and then when you paint again, you're going to be covering up that new area with those pixels. So if you want to get rid of these stripes, we would clone the area nearby and then run our mouse across it. Now, this tool requires a little bit of patience because for best results, you want to sample different regions of your image as you work. So if we were to clone right here, for example, by the time we get over here, the colors are different. The road is light here and the road is dark here. It'd be very obvious that this isn't real because we have a lot of light in the dark regions so we should clone near this source that we want to actually get rid of. OK, having said all that, one more thing we need to do is we need to work on a layer panel based on the layer we want to clone. So I'm going to double click on the long road layer and notice that another window opens. Now we're ready to clone. So I'm going to hold the Tilde Key once again. Actually I'm not going to do that. I'm going to zoom in by pulling down because I want you to be able to see the brushes here. Click on the Rubber Stamp Tool or the Clone Stamp Tool. You can choose a brush if you want and you can choose the diameter of that brush by sliding this guy here like so. And when you hover your mouse back in the image, you can see the size of that brush. You can also change the angle, the roundness and the hardness of that brush. So you want a softer brush or a harder brush, you can scrub it left and right and you get a preview as to what your brush looks like. I personally prefer a softer brush. It looks a little bit more realistic to me. Alright, now that I have my brush, I have to also tell the tool where I want to clone from. So I have to take a snapshot of it by holding down on my keyboard either the Alt or Option Key. You know you're doing it right when you hit Alt or Option and then you click one time in the image where you want to start cloning. Then let go of that mouse or of that keyboard and then you can start to clone. So I'm going to zoom in just to show you. Once again, I'll grab my stamp tool, hold down the Alt or Option, click, let go of the key and now I can start to paint. And I'm going to do the same thing, Alt or Option, click and paint. And sometimes don't worry; you have that little overlag or overlap? Simply reduce the size of your brush. Sometimes it's, the diameter's just too much. So I'm going to reduce that a little bit and I'm going to continue to paint. And that's how I can get rid of things. How cool is that? Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom back out and I'm going to show you how to replicate things. So this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this house here and put it here. So I'll grab the stamp and I'm going to reduce the size of the brush, try to match it a little bit, hold Alt or Option, click, move my mouse and start to paint. The secret with this tool is you want to keep your eye on the crosshair. Whatever the crosshair covers is what you're painting. And now I'm adding another crazy, little house right here. And I can do the same thing with this one. And I can put that over here. So that is the magic of the Clone Stamp Tool. You can get rid of things or you can add things to your image.