BRING YOUR PHOTOS TO LIFE using 2.5D parallax animation | Photoshop & After Effects Tutorial

what's going on guys my name is Josh and in today's video we're gonna learn how to bring your photos to life using 2.5 D animation this is a great technique to tone your photos to make them that little bit more interesting for you upload them to your social media I know this works really well on Instagram at the moment especially now they've implemented the Instagram stories feature it's just a great way of making yourself stand out from the crowd and keeping your followers attention so I'm gonna show you two ways of doing this today the first is a simple version that just using Photoshop and then the second will be taking it a little bit further in After Effects but if you have Photoshop we are good to go let's not waste any more time let's jump straight into the computer and then some 2.5 D animation okay guys so I'm gonna try and go through this as quick as I can as we do have two different techniques to go through and I don't want this video to be too long so if I don't go over something very well if I don't explain myself very well at any point feel free to leave a comment down below and I'll try my best to help you out so the first thing we need to do is go to file open find our image here and I'm gonna start off by saying this technique works best when you've got a blurry background like this or if you've got a background with not too much detail in it because if you're trying to cut yourself out from the background and you've got loads of detail it's just not gonna work very well and it's just gonna make your job a lot harder so keep that in mind before you start first thing we need to do is go down here to the layers menu double click on our background layer and press ok to unlock it and we need to cut ourselves out with the lens from the background using the pen tool so you can find the pen tool over here on the left the way the pen tool works is you click if you make points and you keep clicking until you get back to your original point close off the path and you're ready to cut that out from the background so you can do it like this with straight lines which is probably best for a beginner or if you want to make curved lines you click once click where you want it to end hold and drag it'll make a curve now this handle here it's gonna make your next click a curve as well as you can see so if you wanna make a curve and then a straight line afterwards all you have to do is hold down alt on your keyboard click on that final point and then your next line is gonna be straight so I use a mixture of these to get the best results keep that in mind when you're cutting yourself out so it's time to cut ourselves out let's hold down alt our keyboard and scroll in with the squirrel wheel you can also hold down control and use the plus or minus keys to do that as well you're gonna hold down space and click and drag to move around your image whilst we're cutting ourselves out and we're just gonna start cutting ourselves out here let's so you want to spend as long as you can on this because the longer you spend on it the better result you're gonna get and you want to stay as close as you can to the edge of your subject so you don't get any of that background in your selection I'm not gonna bore you guys by making you watch me cut out this whole selection so I'm going to speed this bit up and I'll be back with you once I'm done okay so once you've finished using the pen tool is time to make our selection so if you right click anywhere on the background and go down to mix election we're gonna add a little bit of feathering to it just so it's not such a sharp edge anything from 0.5 to 1 pixels will do press ok and there we go made our selection so I would cut myself out from the background by holding ctrl and pressing X then we'll go down to the bottom right hand side the screen press the new layer button then I'm gonna hold ctrl shift and press V and we're right back where we were apart from we're on a new layer now so now I need to fill in this gaping hole where I used to be in the background so to do that we're gonna hold ctrl click on the new layer has made our selection again we'll go up to select modify expand and we're going to expand our selection by 20 pixels press ok and then we can hide this layer so making sure we click on the background layer or go to edit feel make sure the content is on content-aware press ok and just like that Photoshop has magically filled in that gap where I used to be so if I press M and deselect this you'll see it's actually done a really good job of that a lot better than I was expecting actually so your your result might not be quite as good as this and if it's not you can fix that with the clone stamp tool so if you come over here to the left hand side of the screen you'll find the clone stamp tool where can i min make this a little bit better maybe around my head I've got this little outline around my head that could be made a little bit better I guess so the way the clone stamp tool works is you hold alt you click to make a selection and it's going to use that selection to fill in of wherever you're painting so let's do it right here this little bit of hair hold alt and I'm going to paint in on the background layer over that little bit of hair everywhere else looks pretty good to be honest it worked a lot better than I thought it would so I don't really need to do much of this but you might not you might have to in your result obviously different images create different results and this has worked perfectly well without really any need of doing it so I'm going to leave that for now I need to do exactly the same thing with the camera lens cutting it out and doing any clone stamping so I'll fast forward that bit and I'll be back with you when I'm done okay so I've now split the image into all of its components we've got the lens on its own layer we've got me on my own layer and we've got the background on its own layer it's time to start animating but the first thing we need to do is make sure we've converted all of our layers to smart objects reason we need to do this is so we can scale them up and down and we're not gonna lose any quality or get any pixelation the way to do this is very simple just select your layer right click on it and go to convert to smart object I'm gonna do this for all of our layers now we are ready to start animating so if we go to file new when we go to film and video make sure it's 1920 by 1080 P 72 resolution press create and there we go we've got a brand new 1080p document ready to animate in so if we go back to our original document make sure we've got all of our layers selected click and drag up into our new document holding down shift and as you can see is absolutely massive so we need to zoom out a little bit hold down ctrl T and we can scale that down so it fits nicely in our new document like that I'm just gonna move this up a little bit and I'm gonna bring the lens down a little bit so it's back in the frame and now we are good to go ready to animate so if we go up here to window go down to timeline and then make sure this says create video timeline and not create frame animation click that little button and just like that we've got some timelines to work with like you would do in Premiere Pro or After Effects so the first thing we need to do is scale up the background so we're gonna pull down the drop down for the background we've got our stopwatches for keyframes here I'm gonna make sure at the beginning of the timeline click the stopwatch for transform then I'm gonna go all the way to the end zoom out a little bit press ctrl T and we're gonna scale this bad boy up a little bit and then bring it down so it's back in the center I might bring it down a little bit more naturally something like that press Enter and then if I go back to the beginning of the timeline and press spacebar you can see that we've now got a nice zoom in on the background and we are halfway there to completing the effect so we need to do now is do the exact same thing but for the other two layers but the opposite way around so if we pull down the dropdowns for these two layers click on these stopwatches for transform and then we go to the end of the timeline make sure we've got them both selected and I'm gonna press ctrl T again and we're gonna scale these down a little bit something like that you want to keep it subtle because it can look pretty bad if you do it too much so if we go right back to the beginning of the timeline press spacebar again and there we go guys that is pretty much the effect complete as you can see nice and simple just adds a little bit of movement to the image to make it more interesting I'm going to do one final thing I'm going to to make the lens so it's falling a little bit so if I go back to the beginning of the timeline here I'm just gonna move the lens up here and if I go to the end again I'm gonna drag it over so it's a line as you can see it's just falling down a little bit so once you've completed your animation and you're ready to export it all you have to do is click this tiny little button here at the end of the timeline go to render video and then there should be a preset for YouTube under H point 264 so if you just pull down this drop down go down to at YouTube 1080p you can choose your frame rate some people like 24 some people like 25 I'm gonna leave mine at 29.97 I'm just gonna choose my hard drive here I'm gonna rename this to parallax tipped Photoshop and then simply just press render and you'll see the final result on-screen now okay so there we go guys that is how you do the effect in Photoshop if that's what you wanted now to do feel free to stop watching the tutorial here otherwise stick around because we're gonna be taking it into After Effects and taking it to the next level ok so if you've decided to stick around make sure you've got After Effects open and your original an animated vertshock file saved the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna import it into the project by double clicking here finding it pressing import and you've got to make sure your import kind is on composition retain their sizes and the editable layer styles is checked press ok and there we go we've import it in so first thing we want to do is want to make a new composition by pressing this button here they're gonna call this main comp make sure it's 1920 by 1080 whatever framerate you want to use and I'm just gonna do it for 8 seconds from the press ok and there we go so this is gonna be our main composition for rendering later on so what I wanna do is want to click and drag our Photoshop compositions down into it as you can see it's way too big so if we press S on our keyboard we're scale it down to about 32 looks good we can pretty much just leave this now until later because we're working in the Photoshop composition so if we double click on that one as you can see is literally just the image split up into is separate layers so the first thing to do is need to make these layers 3d so if you see this little cube down here if you click in the boxes on each of your layers below that cube it'll make it into a 3d layer as simple as that next thing we want to do is right-click go to new camera we can leave all of this how it is just press ok and now we've got a camera and all the layers are 3d so the next thing to do is rearrange them in z space so the best way to do this is go to this little drop down menu here go to two views horizontal and now you're going to get one view from the top and obviously your regular view on the right so if we go to our background layer click on that press P for position we're gonna change the z space here to 2000 and as you can see it's been put right at the back of the composition so basically you need to do the same thing for me in the lens and the press P on me I'm gonna do minus 1000 same thing for the lens minus 1000 and then I'm gonna bring in one final layer just a little smoke footage here to make it even more interesting and then put that between me and the background and make that a 3d layer and I'm gonna put this one at two 1000 so between the background and my self so there we go we can see we've got the background back here we've got the smoke here we've got me and the lens here but it looks a little bit weird in our main window because things need to be made bigger so if we go to the background first and we press s for scale we're gonna bring that right up to it fits the screen 135 looks good we're gonna do the same thing for the smoke bring that all the way up 775 looks okay to me now if we click on the camera layer and we press P for position we start moving the Z position you can see we're already getting that effect that we're looking for so what we need to do to create a simple zoom in we're gonna go back to one view here we're gonna go to the beginning of our timeline we're gonna make a keyframe using that stopwatch on position and we're gonna go back to the end of the timeline and click the little diamond here to make another keyframe and then write the beginning we're just gonna edit the Zed space here a little bit something like that go to the end of the timeline and zoom it all the way out something around there that looks good to me maybe a little bit like that so obviously now we need to rescale the background so we're gonna go to the background press s scale that right up to 205 scale the smoke up so it fits as well 9:40 looks good and if we go back to the beginning and press spacebar and there we go we are already getting that parallax effect that we're looking for it's looking a lot better than the Photoshop version and we can make this slightly better by going back to the beginning of the timeline and moving this down a little bit in Y space something like that that should be good it's press space again and there we go so the camera just slightly moves upwards now which just further answers the effect and that is pretty much it for the parallax effect in After Effects you can stop there if you want but I'm going to take it a little bit further and add some movement to my arms and head and the lens as well so if we click on the me layer and we go to the end of the timeline we go to the top of the window here and click the puppet pin tool basically what this does is it makes pins which kind of act as joints so we're gonna click and make one on my hand there I'm gonna make one of my other hand make one in the middle of my face one kind of near this shoulder one on this shoulder and I put one on my body and then I'm gonna put three down here legs just as an anchor to keep myself straight so as you can see if I press you whilst having that layer selected It's Made keyframes for each of the pins so if I go back to the beginning of the timeline and make another keyframe for each one so if I just click and hold and move my mouse down it's gonna do that automatically for me so we've got a keyframe at the beginning of the end for each and every pin now so we can start moving them around and affecting my arms and head so I'm thinking my hands will probably be down a little bit at the start and my head will be a little bit forwards so if we bring this hand down like this and we bring this hand down like this bring my head a little bit forwards and then it go to the end of the timeline and we're gonna bring this hand up a little bit like that I'm gonna bring this hand in like that and then we're gonna bring the head back tiny bit so I'm looking up at it and then we're just gonna finally bring the body a bit more straight like that now if I go back to the beginning and press play now you can see that we've now got a nice bit of subtle movement on my arms and head and just bring in the photo to life even more so the final thing we're gonna do is going to add some movement to the camera lens so if I click off this layer click on the camera lens layer and then I go to the beginning of the timeline press P for position make a keyframe there press R for rotation we'll make a keyframe on the said rotation then I'm gonna press you to bring up all the keyframes go to the end of the timeline I'm just gonna move this down here I'm gonna rotate it to something like that I'm gonna go back to the beginning of the timeline and I'm just gonna move that there and I think that should be good if we press play now and there we go guys that is pretty much the final result you probably want to spend longer than I did trying to get it as perfect as you can we've got admit it looks pretty damn good as it is once you've finished your animations and you're ready to render it out you're going to go back to that main composition and as you can see here it is all nicely framed ready to render we're gonna go to file export add to render queue gonna click on lossless change that to QuickTime go on for my options make sure everything's looking good please point 264 20k bitrate looks all good to me press ok then we're gonna name this to parallax toots AE save press render and you'll see the final result on-screen now anyway guys I hope you found this tutorial helpful if you did and you want to show me some support please drop a like on the video let me know down in the comment section below if you have any questions or if you've got stuck at any point and I'll do my best to help you out and also let me know if you have any suggestions for future tutorials you'd like to see me do subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Josh Keogh

Views: 987,361

Keywords: how to 2.5D animation, how to parallax effect, how to 2.5D in photoshop, how to 2.5D in after effects, how to parallax effect in photoshop, how to parallax effect in after effects, how to bring your photos to life, how to bring your photos to life in photoshop, how to bring your photos to life in after effects, how to 2.5D animation parallax effect, 2.5D animation tutorial, parallax effect tutorial, 2.5D animation tutorial photoshop, 2.5D animation tutorial after effects

Id: GZimVBFSGm0

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/sideswiped]

That's a rather destructive editing approach in PS. You loose any ability to refine the edge after that hard cut & paste. Why not use a layer mask to isolate the subject instead? Path selection is also a very slow process that would likely be better offloaded to the Quick selection tool. Especially so with how well the subject is contrasted off the background. You could still incorporate the path selection process around any low contrast edges, as needed.

[u/InpregnableD]

Very Cool, I'll have to try this, maybe for something on IG.

Thanks!

[u/Jordan121787]

Nice! Thanks for showing me how it's done!