AE Tools creates a panel in After Effects that allows the artist to quickly add effects with the single click of a button instead of navigating through multiple menus or the Effects and Presets panel. After realizing that I was wasting time with every additional click while working, I decided I would save myself some trouble by collecting the functions I use the most into one place.
EXR Workflow EXR Workflow gives you a UI panel to quickly add EXtractoR and Exposure effects to any selected layers with the click of a single button! You can also optionally check and uncheck which of the effects you want to add, while also customizing the Gamma Correction (default 2.2) of the Exposure effect by typing in the provided text field.
Layers The Add Layers panel creates a set of shortcuts to quickly generate layers, with additional functionality to quickly edit the composition background color.
Quick FX QuickFX adds an additional section to the panel using commonly-used effects. These are hardcoded for the time-being, but will hopefully become dynamically added in the future by the user.
Chroma FX ChromaFX adds an additional section to the panel that contains effects used commonly in a green-screen or matting workflow.
Install AETools by downloading the two .jsx files from the 'QuickFX' folder. Place both of the .jsx files into your After Effects installation directory. For example: "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2020\Support Files\Scripts\ScriptUI Panels".
Load up AE, and go to Window. Select the UI Script from the bottom of the list.
Known Issues/Roadmap
//The panel does not currently scroll, so you will need to expand the panel to see the options you need. The current workaround utilizes checkbox toggles to hide the effets you don't currently need so the panel is vertically shorter, but a complete rebuild will be needed to make it scroll in the future.
//The panel resets itself everytime you load AE. Future versions will hopefully remember the user's last settings.