No offense to all the roto artists, but no kid’s answer “rotoscope artist” when asked what they want to be when they grow up. It is a skill that one grows to love. You like it more the better you get at it. Rotoscoping, or roto for short, has become a blanket term that could mean a lot of things.

…learn how to use Photoshop to enhance your After Effect’s Rotoscoping skills…

Originally, it meant painting over live action footage frame by frame. In today’s world it could mean anything from making live action footage, to painting something out on every frame. The latter of that range, is what AE Blues’ Roei Tzoref shows off, in his latest tutorial.

Roei shows his workflow for using Photoshop to paint on individual frames that were exported from After Effects. Using photoshop’s familiar brush and clone stamp tools might offer some better control in some cases. Especially when you need to clean up some stuff on a few frames, that would be messy to handle with Ae’s tools.

Roei shows how to round-trip After Effects footage to Photoshop and back again, working with a composite of stop motion footage.