But I do think that turning a little bit of Depth of Field on makes this look more natural. If I'm going to switch it Off, then the text will return to the sharp, previous focused version. This is actually a function of the camera which I've set up, so underneath the Camera Options over here, you can see that I've turned on Depth of Field. Now, this blur is not something which is related to the Corner Pin effect or the text. If we're going to zoom in, you may be able to see that there is a slight blur. Note that since we are working with live text, we can actually bend it and deform it and distort it as much as we can, and After Effects will still be able to render a pristine and sharp result because every layer of text inside After Effects is by default a vector layer, and you can see here in the timeline that you cannot even turn off the icon for the continuously rasterized option. And you can also turn the effect off and on, to see if this looks better or it may need some extra work. Let's do the same for the other paragraph, I'm going to select the words Corner Pin in the Effect panel, and then I'm going to drag down, and just try to change and distort the perspective, so it will look like this is actually in the same angle of the page.
And as you can tell, this is a matter of trial and error and personal taste. Now, a very helpful trick here, is to hide the layer boundaries, so I'm going to press Cmd Shift H, Ctrl Shift H on the PC, and just verify that I did a nice job, if not, then of course we need to work on it a little bit more. Now, I'm going to deselect, select the first paragraph, meaning the left one over here, and then select the effect and very gently move the upper pins, in this case the right pin, a little bit to the left, and maybe down, just in order to try and make the perspective better.
And I'm going to do so by selecting both of them and applying the Corner Pin effect, so I'm just going to start to type the word corner, and then double-click it, this will apply the effect for both layers. But I actually want to distort the layers so they will feel more connected to the page layout over here, to the perspective of this book. So, for example, I can reduce the size of the font, say to 24 pixels, and then of course you can play with other properties inside the character panel as your heart content. And by that I mean some font which will look like the letters are not hanging out of the boundaries of these pages. In this case, I'm going to settle with Avenir Next Condensed, you may or may not have this font in your machine, it doesn't really matter, just choose something which kind of looks appropriate for this design. So, I'm going to highlight my first option over here, and then just verify that the font name is still selected, so I can use my down arrow key and just look for different fonts that are installed on my machine. But now, we can actually ask After Effects to show us more options in terms of fonts, for example. So, in case you just received the document from a different designer, which worked on a different computer, you may see a different font here if you haven't installed the appropriate typeface. Assuming that you have that same font, it will look exactly the same. Then we can select both of those layers, so layer number 2 and layer number 3, go to the Layer window and choose Convert to Editable Text. So, let's say goodbye to Photoshop, this was just in order to verify that indeed we are starting with live text. And indeed we can see that both of these text paragraphs are live text, meaning that After Effects can actually access this information if we ask it to. So, I'm going to select one of these layers and then press Cmd E on the Mac, Ctrl E on the PC, in order to open this frame inside Photoshop. The text was created using Adobe Photoshop, and of course, we can select this text and convert it to an editable After Effects text, but first, I just want to verify that indeed this is a live text inside Photoshop, because otherwise this trick will not work.
And on top of this, I laid out two 3D layers of text. So, I have this composition over here, and the background was designed using Video Copilot Element 3D. I want to share with you one possible scenario where you may want to use this kind of workflow between Photoshop and After Effects.
This workflow is very flexible because it will allow you to add final touches to the text, as well as completely change its look and appearance on screen. However, if you really want access to the specific font and letter size, you do need to make sure that you are working with live text inside After Effects. Then you can bring the text inside After Effects and animate it over here. Sometimes it's more easy to work on a typographic design in our software.