Resizing an image in the imported photo without scaling? blood on the wall

[julianm44443758]

What is the easiest and fastest way to reduce the size of the blood smear of an imported photo with white background in After Effects in order to make a realistic size blood smear on the white wall behind the actor ?  I used the scaling to zoom in to fit the photo into the frame but the blood part now takes about half of the frame which is off course way too large of an area.

[Rick Gerard]

You should size still images to appropriately fit the frame before you bring them into After Effects. Fine tuning is done by adjusting the scale. Ideally, you want still images and video to be somewhere very close to 100% scale at some point in the project.

It sounds like you are very new to AE. Make sure you spend some time learning the basics. Without workflow details and screenshots it is pretty hard to see what you are doing and make any reasonable suggestions on your workflow.

[julianm44443758]

I have a photo imported to After Effects and I need to make the blood stain part in the photo smaller how can I do that without zooming in and out the entire image? I looked around for quite a bit and did not find anything in this subject is that because the object in the photo has to be reduced in the Photoshop first unfortunately?

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Grab the corners of the image with the selection tool (v), hold down shift and drag. Open up the scale transform properties in the timeline and adjust the scale (s). Read the help files. You will never learn AE by just poking around in the app and asking questions in forums. You are wasting your time. Start here: Basic AE