In today's video I'll show you,
how from this old photo I made an amazing 3D parallax effect
which looks like a real video. And all you need for this
is a Photoshop and Premiere Pro. No plugins, no After Effects.
This tutorial will be very simple and basic. I love easy stuff. [Music] Hi guys, my name is Pavel and on this channel
I share my tips for video content creators as well as my cinematic stories.
I'm sure you've heard about the parallax effect, which is a technique where the
static image looks like a video thanks to the micro movements of the background and foreground elements on it.
And there are many many tutorials on this topic, mainly using Adobe After effects
and third-party plugins that you purchase. But of course there are
many ways to do that without spending extra money.
And in several cases you'll get even better results by applying the set
of basic techniques that I'll share with you right now in my video.
So, let's then jump into our tutorial. Aright, we are in Photoshop
and as an example I chose this old historical photo which is a colorized
version of this original. And this is not a random
photo from the Internet. This photo was taken in spring of 1918
in Minsk, my native city, in Belarus, where I come from.
And on 25th of March I celebrated the 103rd anniversary of the proclamation of
the independence of the Belarusian National Republic, which was the attempt to create
a Belarusian state on the territory unfortunately controlled by the German imperial army
during the World War I. This date is
very important for me as well as for many other Belarusians. And this is the
main reason why I picked a photo from that period of time.
So, the most important thing in creating a really great parallax effect
is to have several elements on your image that are located
pretty far from each other. In our photo I can clearly see
3 elements that I'll be able to separate. The first one
is this German soldier. Then these two ,I believe,
German officers. And finally the rest of the image. I will
start selecting objects using a quick selection tool
and copying the selected area into the new layers afterwards.
But before selecting i will go to the Select and Mask menu
to set feather to 2 in order to have softer edges in the selected area.
This tool is very simple. The areas you need you just select using your mouse,
the areas you don't need you select the same way by holding the Alt,
or option key for Mac users, on your keyboard. After selecting the object
just simply right click and choose Layer Via Copy.
Let me do that with the officers as well and then we'll move forward. [Music] Alright, we have now 3 layers:
one soldier, two officers and the rest of the image.
If we leave it as it is, we may still get this
parallax effect, however while moving these
copied layers we'll see their originals underneath,
and that looks really bad. What we need to do — we need
to erase the militaries from this first underneath layer
and recreate the environment without these people in the image.
"Why wouldn't we just cut them?"— you might think. Well, cutting the objects will not help us, as we will get just
the empty space in their place. We need to have this area filled with an image.
But this is not a problem for Photoshop. For just a moment let's hide our layers with people we've cut before
and focus on the back layer where so far we have everything.
To not do the same work with selecting the objects,
I will make a selection trick. Hide for a moment the main layer
and open the one with the soldier. Choose Object Selection Tool. [Music] And select the man. [Music] After we select him, hide this layer back
and return to the main layer. Right click with your mouse on the image
and use the option "Content Aware Fill...". Photoshop will open
two windows. On the left there is our original photo
with the selected area that Photoshop is taking into consideration
while generating the environment inside the area we've selected.
On the right side we have a preview of how that would look.
If you don't want Photoshop to take some areas of the image into consideration
such as people's faces or the elements that are
very different from the area behind the soldier, we can just simply
deselect it in the left screen by moving the circle and erasing the green
area. By default it's green, but you might choose any color from the menu
on the right side. [Music] Once we are satisfied with the result
click Apply and then OK. Right away you'll notice an additional
layer that will appear on our layers panel. These are the changes that we've just made. All you need to do is just to press
Ctrl or Shift button on your keyboard and select these both layers
that we are working on right now. Right click and choose "Merge Layers".
The same thing we'll do with these two officers. We select the area,
fill it with the environment, merge the layers and as a result we have the image without these three people in it.
It shouldn't be perfect, in case you don't have much movement in your video,
but if you have, that would uncover a larger area behind our militaries.
So, in this case you would need to paint the area behind them more precisely.
For that you may use a regular Brush Tool or Clone Stamp Tool to replicate the area in other places.
But if your objects have a very good separation from the background,
most probably you would not even have to do that. [Music] That's it! We have a 3-layers image
and now we may save our file using a .psd extension, a regular
Photoshop file. Let's now create a Premiere Pro project
and import our Photoshop file. Let's start a new project
and name it parallax. [Music] Alright. When we drag the Photoshop file to our project panel,
you'll see several options that we have. I could import it as a sequence
right away, but we have just three layers.
So I'll choose the option "Individual Layers". Hit ok
and you'll notice a new folder that contains 3 images.
Drag the entire folder to your timeline and put them in the exact order we had them in Photoshop,
so the closest object to the viewer, in our case it's German soldier,
is on the top. We may rename our layers on any stage of our work
i will do it now to have a better idea what each layer represents.
At this point our sequence is almost square, but I know
that I would like to have my video in 4K. I could set
my sequence size at the very beginning, but to show you that it can
be done at any stage, I will go to sequence now and in the
sequence settings I will set 4K resolution for my project.
And to fit the entire screen at least from the top to the bottom
I will select all layers and from the right click we'll choose the option
"Scale to Frame Size". At this point we've completed the most
complex and boring work. Now there are only a couple of steps
left to make our image actually move. By the way, guys, I saw a lot of tutorials
where people had just 2 elements in their sequence — the background
and the object in the foreground. And they called it "the parallax". Well, technically it may be a parallax, but it doesn't even give you the feeling of
dimension. As for me the real parallax effect you may obtain
having minimum 3 moving elements. And this is exactly what we have in our
example. Let's get back to it, by the way. The parallax that kind of makes sense
and is pleasant to our eyes is the one that looks more natural. We may use
the motion toggles in the effect controls panel to move our objects,
but in order to obtain the most natural motion blur in our animation
we will look for a "Transform" effect and drag it into every layer we have.
After that let's set in each of our 3 effects the shutter angle
to 180 degrees. The higher the value in the shutter is,
the more motion blur you'll get. If your objects are not moving fast,
then 180 should be more than enough. Now let's go to the very first frame of
our composition and put the marks for the starting position and scale
for all three layers. Since our movement starts simultaneously,
all three layers have starting points at the same point in time.
I don't think we'll need the entire length of our layers for this effect.
It will be enough to have around 3-4 seconds only. So I will adjust the length of my layers and afterwards we'll move to the very
last frame of my composition. Since the soldier is the closest object
to the viewer, I will start with him. I will be increasing his scale
and moving his position until he disappears from the screen
and becomes big enough, giving the impression
of real motion towards him. Alright. These values now, and I'm
talking mainly about the scale, is our reference now.
All other layers that are located farther than our soldier
cannot have the scale value equal or higher than our soldier.
And that is one of the mistakes a lot of creators do.
They make the motion the way that the background becomes larger in scale than
the objects in the foreground. And that looks so unnatural. There are
exception of course if someone wants to simulate a vertigo effect,
but for natural motion never make background objects move faster
than the ones you have in the foreground. So, let's then move our officers closer, but not so close
as we did with the soldier. As you can see, the end scale of our
officers is much smaller than the soldiers', but the motion itself
looks much more natural for us despite such a huge difference in scale.
The last layer obviously will have even less motion, so the end scale of it
I will set for around 150sh and change its position a little bit down.
I will additionally add "Ease Out" and "Ease In" effects
in each layer to have smooth start and end. [Music] And additionally I will add blurriness
to my background, so once the foreground objects are getting closer to the viewer,
the background image is getting more and more blurry.
In the effects tab find the effect called "Fast Blur" and drag it
to the background layer. The beginning of our blur effect
will be obviously set to 0. And let's finish it on... let's say... 30.
I will also make this transition smooth setting the starting and ending points
to "Ease Out", "Ease In" accordingly. And now I'll also check
the option "Repeat Edge Pixels" to have the entire image blurred
without artifacts on its edges. Now it looks much better.
Let's select all our layers. Right click and choose "Nest..."
to have our composition in one sequence. Hit OK. Find again the "Transform" effect,
drag it to our sequence and now I'll show you a couple of
final tricks to make our parallax just perfect. To make our video free of black
bars on the sides I will increase the scale of the image at the starting point
to cover 100% of the screen. Right away I will increase the shutter angle
to 180 degrees. And now to give our video more handheld effect
I will be moving our video slightly up and down,
left and right every quarter of a second. Of course more or less,
there is no precision needed. We just want to add a little bit
more of dynamics. That's it! Done! I have just transformed
an old static photo into an amazing 3D parallax effect
using just two tools: Photoshop and Premiere Pro
without any plugins. Doesn't it look fantastic? I'm pretty
sure if you got to the end of this video, you'll have no issues with creating your
own parallax animation. But if you need to go back and check
some particular actions in Photoshop or Premiere Pro, I created the chapters,
so it will be much easier to navigate through this tutorial. If it was helpful,
like this video and share your thoughts in the comments section.
I will be happy to hear from you. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't
done that yet, check out my Instagram for even more awesome content.
Love you guys and see in the next one. Cheers! [Music]
