How to create live images - Cinemagraphs in Photoshop
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Hi there, this video is all about creating Cinemagraphs in Photoshop. You can see the water's moving, but everything else is still. Let's turn the little mask off, you can see, that's the whole image looping around, but with a cool little mask you can make it just happen a tiny little bit. And with a little bit of layer loopiness, it can play forever. We'll do a couple of versions, this one as well, coffee beans, just keep on going forever. Then we'll look at exporting them as a gif, so you can upload them to websites and social media, and have one of those kind of Harry Potter newspaper living image things. Let's learn how to do it now in Photoshop.
To create our Cinemagraph we're going to go to 'File', 'Open'. In your '13 Video' file let's open up 'Cinemagraph 1'. Now this particular effect works mainly because I found a video that has something moving, water's a good one. It's easy to fake and fudge. And this guy doesn't move too much. He does over the whole course, but I'm just going to use a little snippet at the beginning here where he's not moving very much. If there's a lot of movement, or the camera is actually panning across and moving, it just doesn't work. So static, foreground, background, and just have something moving within it. It can be a waterfall, it could be things being poured out, hair blowing in the wind. If you Google 'top cinemagraph animations' into YouTube, it will give you some ideas of things you could do.
Now I'm going to run through what you need to do step-by-step. The only reason I remember how to do this is because I've taught it so many times. It is really hard to remember off the top of your head, so what I've done is, in your 'Class Projects', I've created this one called 'Cinemagraph', and I've just done it step-by-step. Even then my notes, it's still quite hard, so there's lots of playing, pausing, don't worry, everyone finds this tough.
First thing to do is, let's just make sure, under this little cog here, that we've got a loop playback, because that's it, right? We want to create an animated gif that just plays forever. So for this to work we need to find a part of the animation. I'm going to use this part here at the beginning, where he's not moving too much, then we need to trim out the beginning. You have to drag this side up to some degree, and under that again, so you need to drag the left of this layer to the right. All that means is that when I drag this out of it, there's some extra stuff in there, it's kind of hidden, there it is there. So you trim it in, so you can't see it. So that's required, and then it kind of does this little loop here. And eventually I'm happy with it there. I'm going to drag in this side as well, just need a little short snippet to loop.
Now let's have a look, 'space bar', just to see it looping. I want the water looping, but not him, maybe a bit longer. Problem is there's a bit of movement in there but I'm going to risk it. Trim out the beginning, have to do that, trim at the end, you don't have to do that part, but it was just too long, I want a short little loop. With the layer selected, let's duplicate the layer, copy and paste it. I just hit 'Command C', 'Command V', or 'Ctrl C', 'Ctrl V' on a PC. So there are two layers now. Now for this to work, it can't be in this little group here, so just grab 'Layer 2'. And just drag it out, just drag it anywhere down here. Now they can work on side by side. The left of Layer 2 gets dragged all the way that way, and the right of it gets dragged in so that it aligns with Layer 1. That's a bit you'll never remember. I'll do it again after this a little bit faster. So if you are watching this and following along, watch this, then we'll do it together a little faster, and you can pause, and do your own version.
Now nothing's going to happen. What we need to do now is fade this out to show through the image underneath. It's going to create the loop. So let's move our playhead anywhere between where these two overlap. So I'm going to start somewhere here. Click on this top layer here, 'Layer 1', twirl it down, and I'm going to start with my Opacity. Turn on the little stopwatch, so here's my first keyframe, you just leave that one, then anywhere between here and here, you'll have to adjust this depending on your animation. So anywhere in here, as long as it's still overlapping, put it in another keyframe, and lowering the opacity over here in your Layers Panel. So basically it's going to play and then start getting more and more see-through. I'll turn this one off. So it's going to get more and more see-through. And because of this trick we did with this last level, this one picks up, basically starts playing here, with that bit snipped off, till eventually it gets to this end part which is actually the beginning here. Which probably doesn't make any sense to you. I always get blank looks in the class.
So with them both on now, hopefully now we've got a loop. There's a little bi