Setting up After Effects

As far as software tools are concerned, for the edits we want to perform here we could use any one of a number of high-quality post-production applications, a list of which would probably include Nuke (from The Foundry), Fusion (by eyeon Software), Composite (from Autodesk), or indeed the compositor mode that is built into the freely available Blender application.

For sheer ease of use though, we will make use of Adobe's After Effects package. This means that while the steps we take here are of course being applied to single images, we could just as easily apply them to an animated sequence and have the end result turn out exactly the same.

Note

If you are an Adobe Photoshop user, then the good news is that it should be a fairly simple matter to transpose the steps we use here into that application as the two pieces of software share tools, terminology, and workflows (being layer-based) pretty closely.

The only drawback would be the need in Photoshop to drop down from...