Mikey Borup has a look at creating a super easy After Effects light wrap effect. A light wrap is essential in compositing, bringing in parts of the plate photography background onto the composite foreground elements. It will really make a big difference to have your composted elements sit much better in your shot.

The thing is, After Effects doesn’t have a dedicated tool for this. You are left to your own devices when trying to make this effect.

There are a couple of ways to do this using some of the effects in Ae. There are also some third party tools that will either help you along, or are specifically developed to create the light wrap effect, such as the Digieffects Light Wrap plugin for Ae.

Mikey shows us here, that  you can easily make an After Effects light wrap on a basic composite.  Mikey uses a few simple effects that come standard in Ae, mentioning that this method does not require a lot of layers and duplicating nested comps.