My After Effects merges files when i import it

[Giovanni293369591bwz]

I have a .psd that have multiple layers in a group, and i want to animate them separately in AE, but when i import the .psd, all the layers come merged, even when i select to import as Composition - Retian Layer Sizes os as Composition

The .psd is an artwork of a human, so it has a layer for each finger, each arm, each leg and so on, and i really dont want to convert every single layer to a .psd just to make it work. Yesterday i imported a differnt character with the same layer organization and had no problems. Restarting the computer and AE didin't worked too, and both AE and Windows (10) are updated.

[Kyle Hamrick]

Have you tried ungrouping the layers in Ps before importing? If EVERYTHING is nested into one group, I could see how perhaps Ae is getting confused somehow? Ae will typically interpret Ps groups as pre-compositions, but there's a limit to how deeply it can be nested before that stops working. 

One other thought: If your .psd has already been imported into Ae as a piece of footage (i.e. everything sandwiched into one asset), you can right-click > Replace Footage > With Layered Comp. 

[Giovanni293369591bwz]

Just tried and both didn't worked, they keep merged. But I just found out that maybe the problem is the .psd.

I tried importing again the .psd with the other character that worked before, and it imported just fine, all the groups into pre-comps. But now I have no idea what the problem with the .psd is. 

The file I'm trying to import has only 4 characters, each with its own group of layers, and the biggest group has only 6 layers. The file is 4333x2780 px with 200 ppi (wich is a very exaggerated resolution for those characters).

[Kyle Hamrick · Accepted solution]

Aha - any chance your PSD is set to CMYK instead of RGB?

[Giovanni293369591bwz]

Yeah, it was with CMYK. Converted to RGB and it worked! 😄
It makes sense that AE would not work with the color scheme for physical media. And I even got lucky that the colors kept almost identical when converting.

Thank you very much for the help! 😄

[Kyle Hamrick]

Always nice when it's an easy solution! 

[Stargazer on ARM]

EDIT:

I wrote "footage" by old habbit though refering to still images/pictures. Just replacing with the correct word, sorry about that.

Sorry, but it didn't work for me.

I have got all my images (.psd files) in RGB and AE is merging still and I have tried every other trick and some others. I had to close AE, rename the old file to something else and then rename the new one to the original name of the old one (I could just overwrite the old file, but I like to play it safe by keeping the old versions just in case).

It worked, but it's a very VERY awkward and roundabout and unpractical way to get the exact result of what "replace footage" used to do for you. Is there a new checkbox or something hidden in the settings somewhere or in the import menue that might make AE actually just replace the footage instead of merging them like this?

Cheers,

Stargazer

PS
Right now I can't think of any practical use for defualt merging of different versions of the same image on import, although I'm sure there must be. Does anybody know?