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!