guru lessons

The guru lessons are a comprehensive beginner course about After Effects. Step by step this free video tutorial series teaches you all the basics you need to get started.

The guru lessons make learning the basics fun. Already in the first tutorials you create amazing effects. If you have little or no experience in After Effects, this is the place to get started.

Guru Lesson 1 - Getting Started with After Effects

Do your first steps in AE. Learn how to import footage, create a composition and work with layers. Then we use blending modes to create a cool fire effect and export the final video.
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Guru Lesson 2 - Effects and Keyframes

In this guru lesson you learn how to apply effects to layers. We create an amazing lightning effect and you learn how to animate properties with keyframes.
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Guru Lesson 3 - Masks and Adjustment Layers

In this guru lesson you learn how to use masks and adjustment layers. We give the guru a dark face and add a vignette to the clip to make it look more interesting. We also cover the per point mask feather available in After Effects CS6 and newer versions.
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Guru Lesson 4 - Color Correction and the Curves Effect

In this guru lesson you learn how to use the curves effect. This single effect can be used to adjust brightness and contrast and even do color correction.
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Guru Lesson 5 - Bluescreen Keying and nested Compositions

In this lesson you learn how to do a blue-screen or green-screen key. You also learn how to work with different compositions and nesting composition as precomps into other compositions.
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Watch more After Effects tutorials

You completed all Guru Lessons? Great! Now you know the basics and are well prepared to watch the more than 100 free After Effects tutorials for intermediate and advanced users.

Recommended Tutorials

Talking Tree with Auto Lip-Sync - Easy Lip-Sync in AE

In this After Effects Tutorial we create a talking tree. While this is usually a lot of manual work and requires a lot of keyframes to animate the mouth, we are going to automate it with the tool Auto Lip-Sync.

The step by step wizard makes it very easy to adjust the automatically generated mouth animation to get the perfect result for our project.

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Creating the Skeleton - After Effects Character Animation Part 1

In this part we create a skeleton for our character with the inverse kinematics iExpressions. The skeleton is the basis for all subsequent animation.
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Advanced Screen Insert Corner Pin with mocha and After Effects

In this tutorial you learn how to replace the content of a tablet PC in After Effects and mocha. Besides the basics of tracking and corner pin, you learn

  • how to do complicated tracks of reflecting surfaces,
  • how to add depth of field to your corner pin
  • how to do rotoscoping quicker with mocha and the Refine Soft Matte effect
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