Doodly Advanced Tutorial

Learn Shading Techniques

Advanced Tutorial #23
Showing how to use masking to create shading techniques and different shading effects to focus a viewers attention in a video.

Left side photoshop elliptical image shading mask for shading techniques used in Doodly.

Black rectangle image mask.

Center photoshop elliptical image shading mask for shading techniques used in Doodly.

Right side photoshop elliptical image shading mask for shading techniques used in Doodly.

Learn Shading Techniques

Article explains how to create shading to focus a viewer’s attention to another area on the canvas.

Prerequisites

Intermediate Skill Level Doodly Tutorial #13: Logos and Opacity

What is shading?

Not to be confused with shadows, shading is the act of darkening other areas while brightening others. If we want the viewer’s focus to be on a specific area within the video, we can darken the rest of the area while leaving the assets for where we want the focus to be a bit brighter. This will draw the viewers eye directly to the area on the canvas.

How to create a shading effect?

We need 1 asset and 4 settings

Asset

Settings

Note: By using this combination, we can create custom and really nice shading effects. This will require preparation in our favorite photo editor but that is nothing new at this point.

Facebook automatically converts transparent PNG images to JPG images so the masks with cutouts attached to this article are for example only otherwise the will need the enter piece removed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to the most common questions regarding this topic.

Shading is utilized to guide the attention of the audience toward a particular section of the screen. By making certain parts of the canvas darker and keeping the target area lighter, the eyes of the audience are naturally drawn exactly where you want them to look.

While they might sound similar, they are actually different concepts. Shading involves adjusting the brightness of the entire scene by dimming the background and highlighting a specific focal point, rather than just placing a dark shape behind an individual item.

You will need a single black mask graphic along with four specific adjustments. The opacity should be adjusted to eighty five percent, the reveal animation needs to be switched to fade, the timing should be between one and a half to three seconds, and the erase function must be turned off.

Creating these specific visual effects often requires custom graphics with transparent sections. You will need an outside image editing application to prepare your black mask graphic and cut out the center portion before importing it into your animation software.

Certain social media platforms automatically change transparent image files into a solid format. When this happens, the transparent cutout is lost, meaning you will have to manually remove the center portion of the image yourself before it can be used properly.

About the author

Wayne Leiser
Wayne Leiser
Editor & Contributor
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