How to Animate Photos and also Blend Photos with Video Using Only Photoshop

[Music] [Applause] what's up guys my name is John Weatherby and I'm a florida-based travel landscape photographer a question I've received a lot lately is how I'm animating the photos I'm posting to Instagram and I'm actually only using Photoshop so we're gonna go over today how you can easily animate your photos in Photoshop or you can combine your photos with video to create a cinema graph so without further ado guys let's jump right into Photoshop alright guys so for the first example I'm going to show you how to add motion to still photos so we use this shot here for our foreground and then we will use this shot here of just the Milky Way for the sky that we're gonna animate and make it appear to be a time lapse so I'll tell you in just a minute why it's more beneficial to use a separate shot of the sky to animate but we'll go ahead and select these images and then drag them right into Photoshop alright so we'll go ahead and use our move tool or V for the keyboard shortcut and go ahead and click on the image and drag it right up onto the other file and drop it right on top then we'll go ahead and hit command T or ctrl T on a PC and we'll just size these to be similar and then we'll just go ahead and hit return we'll make a duplicate of our background so hit command J or ctrl J on a PC go ahead and drag that to the top the next step will be to separate the sky from the background so the easiest way to go ahead and do that would be to go to select and then select and mask now I have my view set to overlay with a color red and then 50% so that I can see what I'm masking out and what I'm leaving in so I'll go ahead and use the brush and you can make this bigger or smaller with your bracket keys I have it set to 150 and I'll just go ahead and paint do the sky and it's gonna go ahead and do its best job at selecting just the foreground and then we'll go ahead and hit option or Alt on a PC to change to the subtract brush and then we'll just refine this selection a little bit where it missed and I'm not too worried about these leaves because we're gonna have to fix those in a minute anyways because it was windy and the leaves were blowing so this looks pretty good I'll go ahead and hit okay so now with this guy selected you're gonna go ahead and hold down option or alt on the PC and click on the layer mask icon and that just made an inverted layer mask and masks out our sky so that looks pretty good and because it's a layer mask you can go ahead and paint using your brush so B is the shortcut for that and the bracket keys also make your brush bigger or smaller and we can go through and just make some refining strokes with the brush go ahead and get rid of some of that fringing and like I mentioned before the leaves were blurry so I might wind up just zooming past this part in our final edit just to avoid this because it's gonna be really hard to fix the masking around blurry trees but otherwise this looks really good so we'll go ahead and zoom back out all right so the next step is to go to file new then go to film and video and then select portrait orientation because we were doing this for the Gramm and then we're gonna change the dimensions to be something closer to four by five so I found that 2300 by 1840 works really well and then we have the rest of the settings are fine we'll go ahead and click create so by default the document shows up with these guidelines just hit command and then H or ctrl H on a PC so then the next thing we need to do is go to window and then click timeline and then we'll go back to our previous document here we'll go ahead and select these two layers with our move tool or the keyboard shortcut we'll just go ahead and drag right up onto our new document here and zoom out and you can see that the file is way bigger than the document we just created so let's zoom out and we'll click command T and that's where our transform tool and you can resize this if you need a little bit more room to see and then we'll just resize our foreground to match up where we want it and then click check alright so the next step is to go ahead and click create video timeline and by default it creates a five-second timeline for you if you want to increase the length of this you can just drag your layer or one of your layers out to wherever you want it to go so let's say nine seconds drag the other one out that far as well and this little icon right here basically just is your endpoint for your work area all right so to be able to animate these we need to convert them to smart objects first so we'll go ahead and right click on our first layer and click convert to smart object and we'll do the same for our second layer so by default this is gonna delete the layer mask but I'm happy with my selection as it is so I'm okay with that if you need to paint anything out or refine it go ahead and do that before you convert it to a smart object but that looks good so the first step is we need to set some keyframes so that we can set our starting and our endpoint for the motion so our goal with this particular edit is to make the Milkyway move through the image to look like a time lapse so I'm gonna go ahead and click this little drop-down arrow here and I'll start our first keyframe off at the very beginning so there's a little stopwatch icon here and we'll go ahead and hit command T and that's gonna give us our transform tool so we're gonna need to scale this up quite a bit so that we have some room on both sides of the image so that when the image moves from the left to the right we don't wind up with a gap basically so we'll go ahead and scale it up and then we'll rotate it to the point that we wanted to start at and I think that that looks good for a starting point we do have a little bit of piece missing here so what I'll do is I'll right-click and I'll hit warp and then I'll go ahead and just warp this over just a touch just to fill that spot in and then I'm gonna go to the very end and set another keyframe right here hit command T for a transform tool again and then I'm gonna make this basically end at the point where it looks like it went through a time lapse so I know from doing time lapses and washing time lapses that the stars are going to basically move over and rotate and go up just a little bit so we'll make it in somewhere like this I'll go ahead and click enter so now if we go back to the very beginning we can see the motion that it's going to go through as we run through our timeline okay so the another thing that I want to do is I want to make the foreground move forward so as also I mentioned before we do have some trees that kind of look a little funny so we could either just zoom in basically so hit command T we could either just scale this up a little bit so that the point it starts is you know that with the trees outside of the frame that works for me so I'm gonna go ahead and do that actually just to hide that this will be my start point here so I'm gonna go up to the little drop down arrow click the stopwatch that creates the first keyframe the very beginning then I'm gonna go to the very end and I'm gonna click here to make another keyframe I'm gonna hit command T or ctrl T on a PC for the transform tools and then I'm gonna hold down option and by holding down option when I'm scaling outwards it's gonna proportionately stretch it out so just to make it up here to be a nice smooth zoom forward and it's not going to move to the left or the right at all so something like that should look pretty cool so I'll go ahead and hit return now if I go back to the very beginning and I click spacebar it's gonna run through the sequence basically and render it as it plays so this will take a minute this is normal for it to basically get the frames per second up to speed alright so now that it has rendered its gonna run through it and basically you can check over on this little gear icon to make sure that the playback is on loop and then it will just play and give you a accurate preview of what your animated photo looks like so at this point we can basically just render it out or we can continue to add some editing to the photo because we are in Photoshop so you can do some cool things still as if this is just a photo even though we're editing it as if it's video or we can also add some shooting stars or something to make it a little bit more interesting so I'm gonna actually go ahead and add a curves layer just to give this a little bit more contrast I'll go ahead and make a little s-curve turn that off and on you can see that's very powerful and you can go ahead and drop the opacity if you need to as well alright so we can also go ahead and add a vibrance layer if we want to make it pop a little bit more we could go ahead and add some vibrance or some saturation we could also add a hue and saturation layer and specifically target certain colors so if I grab my hand tool here and I just click on that orange for instance and I drag that to the left or right I can desaturate or saturate I want to desaturate that just a little bit so that looks a little bit better this is actually light pollution from the city next-door Springdale so that looks pretty good let's see I gotta also like I said had some shooting stars by creating a new layer and then we can just use our brush tool here and zoom in and then just make our brush really small and paint with white at a hundred percent 100 percent opacity 100 percent flow if I click once there's a trick if you hold down shift you can draw a straight line so if I click once maybe just right outside of the edge of the frame here and then hold down shift and click again then I can make a straight line so I want to go ahead and actually let me undo that I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller so using my bracket keys I'm gonna make my my brush even smaller I'm gonna go ahead and do that one more time so I'm gonna click and then hold down shift and then click again so then what I can do now is I can make a selection of individual parts of this and then just basically make a copy so I'll make a selection of this part hit command J and I'll make a selection somewhere in the middle go back to the original part or the original layer we'll hit command J again and then I'll make a selection here at the end and go ahead and hit command J one more time now if I turn off the original layer you can see we have three sections here now and every time that we made a new layer it basically has another layer here into our timeline so let's expand this so first of all go ahead and delete our original layer we drew that a straight line on so now we're only left with these three shorter lines and basically we want to shorten these to become one frame each so I'm gonna shorten them to be a lot smaller second but first one is zoom in and again we want these to be smaller because they're gonna be one frame each so that when the video plays back it basically runs through them in a sequence and it appears to be a shooting star so it'll look something like this we'll see that part first and then the second part and then we'll see that part and it will just fly right through the right through the video and you can do that a couple times throughout your timeline you can basically create the effect of shooting stars throughout your video so once you're finally happy with your edit you're gonna go ahead and right-click on these bars here and then click render video and as I said those dimensions that I chose for 2300 by 1840 and I have it set to 30 frames per second h.264 and then I have the folder that is going to select it and then I'll just name this watchman no keyway cinemagraph all right so everything looks good we'll go ahead and click render and then this will take a few minutes to render based on how good your computer is and then we'll see the final result all right so now if we go to our finder window here and we open this up you can see our final result so this is just one instance of how you can use this tool to add motion to your photos I really like to add it to astrophotos and mimic time-lapse but you can get creative with this guys so if all you wanted to know is how to add motion to your photographs and you can go ahead and in here but if you would like to know how to blend photos with video go ahead and watch upon so I'm gonna go ahead and edit this photo here that are previously edited it's sunset in Iceland at Brewer Frost waterfall and I'm gonna blend this with video from the same spot at a different time and the reason this is gonna line up is because the composition is pretty similar and it's the same focal length but ideally you would actually take the photo in the video at the same time on a tripod preferably and that way you're guaranteed for the photo on the video to line up so we're gonna have to transform this and line it up in Photoshop manually but just keep that in mind when you guys are shooting all right so first we're gonna go ahead and open up Photoshop again go to file new and then we will go to film and video and then for this we're gonna make the height 38 40 and we'll go and make the width 25 60 and the reason that I sized the photo to those dimensions is because the clip is 4k and it's gonna have a height of 38 40 pixels so we'll go ahead and click create and then we'll go back to our finder and we'll drop the picture right on top then we will create video timeline go to new video group here and then we're going to click add media and we'll go back to our cinemagraph folder and grab our video clip here and click open so the clip came in sideways because of the orientation of the file so we're gonna go ahead and go to edit transform and then we'll rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise and click convert and now it is a smart object and we can also transform it and add motion if we need to but first what I want to do is I want to drop the opacity just a little bit so that I can zoom in and line these up as well as possible so again ideally you would shoot the photo in the video back to back and that way you're ensured that they will line up properly by using a tripod like I said these were shot at two different times so I'm gonna manually line these up but because it was the same focal length and pretty same pretty much the same composition this shouldn't be too much of an issue and also we're just gonna blend in the water so it doesn't matter if the rocks and stuff don't line up 100% perfectly we're gonna go ahead and try and get it as best as possible and sometimes just to get the final touches to work you just right click click warp hold down option to make a control point and then just kind of warp your Walker your subject into place as best as you can so that looks pretty good like I said it doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect but we got it pretty much lined up and we're only gonna be painting in the water so like I said the rocks don't matter as much so we'll go ahead and make a duplicate of our foreground layer here and we will go ahead and make a layer mask and then with our brush set to 100% opacity and a hundred percent flow we're gonna paint with black on the white layer mask and that is gonna reveal our video layer underneath so I usually just do this kind of by eye to start and then I'll put it into mask mode by hitting the backslash key and then I can really see where I'm painting like I said the rocks didn't line up perfect so I don't really want to paint on the rocks I'll just keep the selection to the water if I can so you can get as precise or as sloppy as you want with this you can even just paint the whole thing and go back and clean it up if you like whatever works best for you but the goal is to reveal the part that we want to reveal from the video which in this case is the water flowing I'm not gonna go too crazy with this flow I just wanted it in the main areas I'm probably not gonna mess with those because I know for sure that those didn't line up perfectly so I'm good with this here go ahead and hit the backslash key again and you can see our if we turn the layer mask off and on you can see that we have revealed our water from our video and now we can do some adjustments to just the water if we want I know that I need to brighten this up a little bit to bring it up to the same tone so I just added a curves layer here on top of the video I can just brighten that up a little bit and then for something from like water you can even drop the opacity if you want a little bit I just realize the opacity was actually already down so at 100% you can see the water now much more prominent I'm gonna go ahead and turn this back down to like 75% and then we'll see how this looks alright so that's looking really good and the water is legitimately that blue so we don't really need to alter it in any way because you know even with the sunset and still with people to because of the glacier runoff so at this point we can go ahead and continue editing this as if it's a photo again we're in Photoshop so we can do cool stuff like add a photo filter but we need to change the color specifically of the water or of the foreground or we need to make curves adjustment or anything like that maybe add a little more drama to it that's kind of cool or if we wanted to make the water even more blue we could change it to cooling filter and then dial back the opacity a little bit and then that will make the water a little bit more blue so once you're happy with your edit you're gonna go ahead and go to render video and then you're gonna export it as a h.264 high quality 30 frames per second choose your folder and then name it and we will need to resize this because by default they gave us some wrong dimensions so I'm gonna go ahead and size this to be 2 by 3 since this ratio is 2 by 3 and I'm gonna use 20 to 50 by 1500 and that's gonna be a 2 by 3 ratio and we'll go ahead and click render and then if we go to our folder and we open up our final cinema graph we can see our video portion blended with our edited photo and our final product and to show you another example of the same type of technique I just used I did the same edit with Brewer Foss but with a night shot and I used that same video portion but toned it green to match the aurora and then I removed this guy in the same process that we did for the first edit with the Zion and the Milky Way and then I just dropped a video clip time-lapse of the aurora underneath that foreground layer and the background and basically we wind up with a very technical cinema graph so that's pretty much it guys super easy and straightforward I hope that you found this helpful if you have any questions just drop me a comment or a message and if you found the video helpful go ahead and give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you want to see future videos like this and I would love to see your results from your animated photos so if you post them to Instagram tag me Pat whereas whether it be and I'll check them out so I'll see you guys in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: John Weatherby

Views: 3,759

Keywords: Photoshop, Photoshop Tutorial, Adobe Photoshop, Photography, Photography Education

Id: KmKExl9uHg8

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020