Fairytale Lighting in After Effects

In Fairytale Lighting in After Effects (below), the prolific Harry Frank shows you how to "how to take a regular, run-of-the-mill shot and turn it into something beautiful and moody, straight out of a fairytale. You'll learn how to set up a down-and-dirty 3D track, add volumetric light and dust to a live action shot, and then finish it with some simulated camera lens blur."

Harry generously notes some alternatives to Red Giant and Trapcode effects he used. But wait, there's more:

• Tilt-shift blurring alternatives to MB Looks can be found at AE Portal.
• Replacing Shine will require a bit of extra work with the built-in Light Burst effect; Harry's previous tip and an alternative can be found in 3D volumetric lights with Shine or Lightburst.
• Dust particles can be generated with AE's built-in tools; Eran Stern offers a free project that creates floating dust using CC Particle World. Additional perspective can be found in 'Light Transmission' + 'Natural Light Effects' by Trish and Chris Meyer.

Red Giant QuickTip #39: Fairytale Lighting in After Effects from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

Adjustment Lights in After Effects

Using lights as adjustment layers lets you precisely control exposure by controlling which layers are affected by which lights. Chris and Trish Meyer have called these "Adjustment Lights" in their 2008 book Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects (see p. 281).

A few months ago Harry Frank posted a tip on using Adjustment Lights in Trapcode Particular and Lux in in the Red Giant QuickTip series. Here's Eran Stern's presentation from 2009, Adjustment Lights:

Automated Light Rig tutorial & preset + Particular smoke

Quba Michalski has a new After Effects tutorial and project, Tutorial+Preset: Automated Light Rig:

"Most of the time it is the best practice to manually control the lights in your After Effects scenes. There are situations however, when you may want to automate the dynamic changes in light color and intensity while maintaining high level of control over the look of your composition. That’s what the Automated Light Rig is all about.

In this tutorial I will show you how to link your lights with automated samplers on an image map, creating an ever-changing, yet unified, light rig. While the tutorial explains the expressions in depth, I am also providing you with presets simplifying the entire process into just few clicks.As a little extra, I will also show you how to create a 3D light-aware smoke using Trapcode Particular (my method is a bit more involved than the standard Particular setup, but produces results that are much more true to life)."

Realtime 3D lighting from Pixar

Lpics is a realtime relighting engine developed by people at Pixar. See the video and paper from SIGGRAPH 2005. I especially like the way shadows are drawn during pauses.