Adobe's After Effects has been called "Photoshop on steroids." This powerful video compositing program allows you to take still images and turn them into animated pictures. With it, you can layer moving video and create special effects that would take months to perfect with traditional techniques.

After Effects is used by high-end video production studios as well as wannabe MTV-style home video producers. After Effects achieves that rare combination of a powerful, yet easy to use, program-like Photoshop. Not surprisingly, it provides a very logical upgrade path for Photoshop artists who want to learn animation and multimedia.

Real World After Effects goes way beyond the Adobe manual. The book takes the reader from capturing a subject image to outputting the final production to videotape or posting it on the Web. The book covers the basics, but also goes into more depth at the intermediate to advanced level. Finally, it covers a variety of third-party After Effects plug-ins and filters, including KPT's Final Effects. The cross-platform CD-ROM contains "before" and "after" files for each book project.