How to Animate a Still Photo with GIMP

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by davies media design my name is michael davies and in today's tutorial i'll be showing you how to animate a still photo using i'll be using version 2.10.20 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of video tutorials on here my book of layers and free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 master class from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any of my skillshare classes by visiting gimpschool.com and you can get more with a premium membership to davie's media design i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so here is the photo i'll be using for today's tutorial just click the free download button if you have a faster computer you can use one of the larger photos or you can do what i did and just go with the medium size photo here and here is one of the renditions of the final result so as you can see we've made this look like the water is flowing down here and then the mist is coming up i will be using the free gimmick plug-in for this method but for starters we'll need to open up the image we downloaded into so i'll go to file open recent and choose this cascade image so here's the image of the waterfall next what i need to do is duplicate this image so i'll come over here to the layers panel and just hit the duplicate icon so now we have two of these once i have a duplicate i'll go to filters gimmick qt and here we are inside of the interface for the gimmick plugin and what you need to do is find the morph interactive filter so i'll type in morph and under deformations you'll see morph interactive and for starters you'll see preview warning no preview available it might say you need two images so we do have two images here change your input layers to active and below if you have your top layer active or active and above if you have your bottom layer active the output mode is going to be new image so that just means that once we're done with this and all of the animation frames have been created it's going to output this to an entirely new composition and we'll leave the preview mode where it's at so first output default and up top here it says number of frames so this is going to be how many total frames are in your animation if you know that you want this to be a two second animation with 24 frames per second you can go with something like 48 but of course the more frames you create the more it's going to put on your computer the more strain so you could always go with something like a one second 24 frames per second animation which would mean you want to type 24 there if you have a really slow computer i recommend using less frames so something like 10 and then for preview precision if you have a slower computer go with coarsest or faster if you have a very fast computer you can go with finest or slower i'm just going to go with normal and you'll see some instructions here on how to use this i'm going to cover these so i'm going to skip this for now and just come over here and click ok so now we have two screens we have our in between screen which i'll place on the right side and we have our interactive morph or the source on the left i should say this is just the source because they both say interactive morph so what this plugin is doing is it's going to use some key points to morph areas of the photo and when we create those morphed areas that's what's going to make this look animated because the filter is going to place these in separate frames but right now there are no frames here so that is going to be our first task if we left click on here that's going to create a frame and that's not going to do anything over here yet partially because this frame is a still frame and also we don't have any animation running but what i can do if i wanted to animate this frame is i can click and drag it and you'll see that when i click and hold my mouse up top there it'll say target and when i release it'll now say source and over here on the in between screen you can see something has changed and that is the fact that the filter has now morphed the photo here and added that morphing to various frames and if i wanted to preview the animation right now i can hit the enter key so there you can see the morphing that's gone on it's basically taken this frame here this little key point and it's dragged the waterfall area downwards the problem with that is it's also dragged all this other stuff into different places so it doesn't look right we will fix that as we go forward so basically what you want to do is just continue to create these key points so click and drag key points and all those areas will be animated and it will preview them over here in real time as you continue adding frames as you continue adding key points i mean so we're clicking and dragging these key points along the water it's best to drag the key points along the same direction as the water or whatever it is you're trying to animate that way it looks more realistic so you can see what's happening here as we're adding more and more key points to this and you'll notice that our key points stop around this area so that's where i like to click and drag a new set of key points is wherever the first set stopped and what i like to do to make this look more realistic is if i see water changing direction because of rocks or something i'll add more key points there so for example right here and then if you wanted to really get detailed with this you can do every little portion here where you can start to see ripple effects happening from the rocks below like that just keep in mind that the more of these you're gonna add the more strain it could potentially put on your computer and if you look over here because these key points are not animating very far and it's only on this one area it's kind of screwing up the animation so just make sure if you are going to do something like this that you do it throughout the entire animation so for example i can add some more right here and you can see what's happening over here i'm not going to do that on all of the various parts that i want to animate that's just an example but i will continue to animate this portion here and i'll leave it at that for now so let's say you wanted to delete some of these so for example i wanted to delete these up here all i have to do is click on a key point and hit the delete key on my keyboard so make sure you are in fact clicked on these if it's hard to click on them hit the tab key on your keyboard that'll make these little key points larger and then you could click your mouse hit the delete key and there you can see it's a little easier to take care of now and then we can hit the tab key to return these back to their smaller size so next i want to fix the areas that i don't want animating so the areas i don't want morphing with this you can see a lot of the rocks on the sides of the waterfall are moving around so we don't want that all i have to do is just right click on here and you'll see that when i right click it's going to create one key point and these key points are called still key points so these are going to not animate at all they're going to basically tell this filter i don't want these areas moving around so it's almost like an anchor of sorts and i'm basically just going to add these little key points all along the areas i don't want being animated and you'll see that as i do that now this rock is no longer moving and i can do the same on the other side of the waterfall here like so so i like to just layer these across because the more of these you place the better of a job it's going to do of not animating certain parts of the image so we'll do it all along here so there you can see that's changing that the top portion is moving around way too much so we can add those still key points along the top and there you can see that's fixed that and there's some areas up top here as well this doesn't have to be perfect i will show you another step later on on how to help improve this but i definitely don't want the little person here being animated either so what i'll do is come up top and just maximize the screen that allows the person to be more easily clicked and now i'll just click on the portions right click wherever i don't want the person animated so just the entire person here like so and if i come back over here you'll see that's helped clean that area up we can still see the person animating a bit so we need to just click some of the areas around the person here as well as these areas down below and i don't need this screen maximized anymore so i'm just going to minimize it a bit and you can also hold the space bar and that's showing you where things are animating so you can see that this red one here is going past the person and that's creating some problems so what i can do is just click on this red one and hit the delete key and that'll get rid of that and i think this green one might be creating some problems as well so click on that hit the delete key and now the person is no longer being animated so we can reanimate those areas of the waterfall to go around the person as opposed to over the person and then i can continue right clicking here and we'll go around the rock because we don't want the rock to be animated either all right so there you can see this is cleaned up pretty nicely there's still some areas moving around which is fine but i also want to animate this little misty part so i want to make this look like it's swirling so what i'll do is just the same thing i'm going to click and drag this and i'm just going to drag the key point in a swirling motion and it should match that over here as you can see but i probably also need some help having this portion move up so i'm just clicking and dragging to create these key points and then i can right click around here since i can see some of that animating up top and i don't really want that so as you can see now we have a ton of key points here i'll come back over to the gimmick filter just so we can go through some of the instructions that i didn't cover so i'll scroll down so you can use your mouse wheel to manually cycle through the frames over here you can also use the k key to show or hide key points temporarily or if you want to erase them entirely hit the r key and that will start you back from scratch and once you are done placing all of your key points hit the escape key to process them that's what we're going to do right now so let's come over here and we can see our animation and just real quick if i scroll through with my mouse we can see this frame by frame and then if i wanted to replay this just hit the enter key and there it goes but once i'm done i'll hit the escape key so that'll take a moment and then it'll process the frames and once it's done it'll create an entirely new composition i can preview this by going to filters animation playback so this is a built-in feature and i can hit the play button here and that's going to animate our waterfall and you can change the settings down here so for example i can double the speed of this or i can slow the speed down if i wanted to and i can also change how many frames per second there are so let's go with 24 and we'll just go with the normal speed so there you can see that animating but i'll just leave this looping for now because i do want to reference this for the next portion of the tutorial so there's some areas that need to be masked out still because they are animating and i don't want them animating so you can see over here up top here as well over on the left side and some parts on the bottom so what i'll do is i'll come down here and i'm just going scroll up to the very top so you can see all of our frames here number 23 through zero that's all 24 frames and what i'll do for starters is i'm going to come down and click to create a layer mask and i'm going to go with white full opacity and click add and then i'll hit the p key on my keyboard and make sure my color is set to black i'll just increase the size of my brush and i'm going to brush directly on the layer mask so i'm going to paint black anywhere that i don't want animating on here decrease the size of my brush and paint in here you can always come over right click and go to show layer mask if you want to see what your mask looks like and you can clean up any of the areas that you know for sure you don't want to be animated like so right click show layer mask again so now we want to add this layer mask to all of the frames below so what i'll do is right click and go to mask to selection so there's our masked area then i'll come over here to my channels and i'm going to click to create a new channel so that's just the channel tab there next to the layers tab i'm going to choose initialize from selection you can rename this if you want to so we'll go with mask and the fill opacity is not going to matter so i'll click ok and i'll just hide that mask and come over here back to the layers panel come down here to the next layer and first i'll deselect this i'll go to control shift a that'll deselect my selection area come over to the layer mask again and this time i'll go with channel and you can see it's going to automatically choose the mask channel that we created and i'll click add and then i'm just going to shift click on all the layers below and that will automatically add that mask to each one of these layers and this just saves us some time and we're going to mask all of the layers besides the very bottom layer there and now if i come back over to our animation and i come over here and just hit the reload the image button you can see now we have less movement on some of those areas that we didn't want to be animated it's not perfect so what we could do is come back here hit ctrl z to undo the layer masks and continue to work on this layer mask and continue to work on this layer mask so let's come back up here we need to get a little closer to the waterfall and closer to the top of the waterfall as well as there's an area right here that's not completely masked out so on our layer mask with the paint tool let's decrease the size so we can get closer so now i'll come back right click mask to selection come over here let's delete the original create a new channel here we'll keep it named mask and initialize to selection click ok hide that come back here and we're going to now create a layer mask make sure we have this set to channel and click add and we'll just shift click down the line here and then ctrl shift a to deselect our selection area once again come over to the animation and just refresh and now you can see that mask is doing a better job there let's say now we want to export this i'm going to export this as a gif because gifs do allow you to export with animation so i'm going to exit out of here and i'll go to file export or export as and i'll navigate to the folder where i want to export this and i'll just name this waterfall animation dot gif make sure it does end in gif so it'll export this as a gif and then i'll hit export so here we're gonna get some options for exporting to a gif we're gonna check the as animation option and if you want this to loop make sure loop forever is checked and you can also set a delay between the various frames if there isn't one set so right now i did not set a delay between the frames it's just easier to do it here i'm going to set this to 5 milliseconds because i don't want a big delay i'll just set the frame disposal where unspecified to i don't care and then i'm going to check this use delay entered above for all frames so that will automatically use the 10 millisecond delay for all the frames in our animation and i'll click export once we've exported that you can search on your computer for the file so here it is i'm going to double click on it and here is our animated waterfall all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com daviesmediadesign don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 66,958

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, animated GIF, animate still photo, animate an image, image animation, photo animation, photoshop alternative, GIF animation

Id: iXG5x7ilDlU

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020