Making Cinemagraphs for Beginners

how's it going guys I'm Josh and today we're gonna learn how to make cinemagraphs aka those wild things you see all over Instagram that look like moving photos cinemagraphs are a combination between photography and videography which makes for something that's completely flabbergasting to look at our brains typically look for either a photo or video and when it's somewhere in between it's just really mind-boggling in the best of ways I'll be teaching you how to plan shoot and edit cinemagraphs and because this is an introduction to this strange collaboration between two mediums I'll be helping you kind of conceptualize how to capture motion in the best of ways for this now this tutorial will be meant for beginners I'll be walking through every step of the way through Photoshop and shooting we'll be starting with the most classic simple cinemagraph and then we'll be digging into some more advanced ones like the incorporation of boomerangs still images and all that good stuff and Before we jump in I want to give a huge thanks to movement watches for sponsoring this video I'll be using their watches as examples in this and if you want to actually learn how to edit this but you don't have any footage to work with you can download all the example content that I made my cinemagraphs foot for this video right here and final self-promotional note if you enjoy my teaching I have a comprehensive beginner photography course available for sale right here it's nine hours of brand-new content and I think you'll love it anyway let's jump into cinema grass starting off with what you're gonna need you're gonna need a video camera so whether it's a DSLR smartphone I could care less as long as it does video you're gonna want a tripod having staple video is a crucial component of this process and you'll need Photoshop we're we're gonna be putting it all together and if you don't have Photoshop you can download it right here and start off with a free trial how do they work a cinema graph is two things so first it's a layering trick you take a video of a moving subject then you take a photo or screen grab of that moving subject and you lay it on top of that video so now we just have a flat image then we cut out a little hole in that image for the area that we still want to see moving so one area of this cinema graph is moving well the rest of it is completely frozen second it's a never-ending loop so the video part of the cinema graph actually loops into itself so if we played forever without finding a scene now when people realize that a part of this is just a video they expect for the video to end you realize you can watch this infinitely without ever finding a scene it becomes that much more transfixing and that is the magic of the cinema graph so for example I took a video of me flipping through the book then I took a screen grab of that video laid it on top cut out the area where I wanted to see the book moving did some editing finesse to make it look like it was flipping through constantly and repeat and voila we now have a beautiful cinema graph what subjects can we cinema graph you're gonna want to start by looking for subjects that are moving in consistent patterns you can easily turn into an infinite loop so for example some of the most popular starting subjects are water so look for fountains fountains moving the very consistent arches and you can easily keep that going forever same goes for rivers as well as pouring water anything like that is a great move so why started with just a cup of water that I was swirling around and to increase the dramatic effect of what you're making it's helpful to have something in the shot that we freeze that would typically be moving so for example having a person in a cinema graph where the person is frozen and something else is moving looks really awesome because it's jarring not seeing a person move we need to expect them to be meanwhile if you don't have any moving subjects frozen you run the risk of it just looking like a video that happens to be looped and that's not as exciting for inspiration on subjects I recommend you follow scene picks and flixel on Instagram scene pics is an independent creator Flixel is actually a company that sells the software that makes cinema graphs for you that's extremely expensive and you don't even need it because you're gonna learn how to make it yourself and now how to film so film is actually really simple I usually start off with a stable tripod to shooting in 60 frames per second because it's nice to have the option to go in slow-mo but that is just personal preference the most important thing here is you need to identify what part of the cinema graph is gonna be kept in motion and make sure that that footage in the video is completely unobstructed by anything moving so for example in this one I knew that the motion would be the moving water and I'd be selecting all of that so in the background you can see my fingers behind the glass so I needed to keep those fingers extremely still because if I move them at all and make creating a perfect loop so much more complicated I also recommend always doing a couple different takes of the same video just so you have options because in one the table might shake or your hand a little bit whereas in the other your perfectly frozen which is what you need this is a technique for shooting the most basic cinemagraphs I'll be giving some more complex techniques later on in the video but for now this is a really good start also make sure you go ahead and edit the colors of your video before you open it up in Photoshop because it's easier done beforehand and last thing before we actually start editing is I want to talk about the technique for doing so so there are two main techniques for getting the perfect loop for a cinema graph first we have the traditional fade in loop and this is the most classic traditional way to make a cinema graph in which the video actually fades into itself forming a perfect loop simpler subjects tend to lend themselves really nicely of this infinite loop like blowing hair in the wind smoke or a flowing river second is making a boomerang so if your subject is ever-changing and too complex like an urban street scene rather than forming a perfect loop which is gonna be really impossible because you have too many moving parts you actually turn it into a boomerang in which it goes one way and then it reverses and goes the other way and just back and forth and back and forth so the way to do this is you just take the original file you want you duplicate it you played in Reverse and now you have a nice flowing boomerang loop for my subway one I started off by trying to infinite loop but wasn't crazy about how it was looking so I went with the boomerang effect instead which I think creates a really nice abstract look anyway let's go ahead and start editing a fair warning this might seem complicated at first but after you've done this process a couple times it becomes extremely effortless step one go ahead and get your video all set up you might want to cut out your favorite segments before putting it in Photoshop and if so just make sure you add a few extra segments at the beginning and end just to give yourself a little extra flexibility open up photoshop go to file open you go ahead and find that original file if your timeline thing doesn't pop up like so just go ahead and go to window timeline which is good for future reference if you want to close it out later now that we're all set up we're gonna go and make the cinema graph in two phases so phase one is looping the background video phase two is freezing the subject so if you're working with a boomerang strategy you can go ahead and skip phase one because the video will automatically loop if you want to do the fade in method let's start with phase one so seven before we're going to go ahead and drag the bar in the video to finalize precisely where we wanted to start and end so if it's a river this won't really matter much because it's pretty consistent if it's like this watery class we want the first and last frame to look pretty similar so it'll be a smoother loop so I'm gonna go ahead and drag this in a little bit and I'm gonna start right when I put it down so right here I'm gonna drag this just click and drag and now I want to have it bounce a few times and end on another high note where it was similar so right here looks good and if we want to zoom in we can use this tool right here so you'll see and you navigate by holding this little blue arrow this is the last frame this is the first frame so I'm gonna drag this in a little bit so it's more like the first one there we go first last pretty similar which will make for a better loop step number five we're now gonna duplicate this video layer by dragging this layer to duplicate so we're gonna grab video group layer one just take it to this right here and now we have it doubled so it's the exact same layer right on top of each other you can also duplicate by hitting command J on a Mac or ctrl J on a PC step number six we're now gonna take the bottom layer and move it so that it begins right where the top layer ends and it's helpful to zoom in so you can get that really nice and precise at this point this video layer starts right where this video layer ends so to create the perfect loop we're gonna drag this in just a little bit and we're gonna get rid of all this extra parts they end at the same point so now step seven we're gonna fade this top video layer out so that it loops into itself so go ahead and hit the drop down arrow right here and go to the point where the bottom video begins so let's navigate to right here this is right where it starts we're gonna hit the opacity button right here so now we're going to do we're gonna drag this a little bit further we're gonna hit opacity again we're gonna put it to 0% opacity and this makes it completely see-through we're gonna take this right to the very end frame opacity is how steep you your images and these diamond markers told the video to slowly fade from completely opaque 100% solid right here to 0% or a completely transparent right here so this top layer is slowly fading out well this layer is still 100% solid now because this bottom layer is still 100% solid this creates the effects so that this video fades out into itself so creating a perfect loop so let's go ahead and play it back and to make it play infinitely make sure you have loop playback checked right here in the settings so go ahead and hit play and give it a whirl it's gonna be a bit laggy at first but wants to start going you'll see we have a really nice loop right here and you can press pause to stop it go ahead and toss a quick save as a PSD in case Photoshop crashes as it sometimes does with these large video files and you can do command shift save or just hit file and then save as before we move on to phase 2 we do want to make sure we have a perfectly looping video and it's sometimes hard to be sure of this in Photoshop splay back since it can be slow and laggy so what I often do is I export it dump it into a video editing software and duplicate it so I can watch it repeat a bunch of times to get an idea of how the looping will actually look so step number 8 you can skip this if you're feeling confident but if you want to double check go ahead and hit file export and render video choose a good names this will be doing a bunch of refining tests and it gets messy if you don't organize your names so we'll call this looping test one high quality is good all frames nothing else needs to be changed go ahead and render we're going to do now I'm just gonna open up iMovie really any editing software is fine so let's toss this in iMovie just gonna duplicate it a bunch of times and give it a watch your videos either going to loop beautifully or you'll think of the fade-out was too obvious too fast or too slow so to fix this try adjusting the length of the fade-out so shortening in is often really helpful since it makes the scene of the loop much quicker so to do this we're going to take the left side of this clip and just dragging it a little bit we're gonna drag this diamond so it goes and aligns perfectly so then go ahead and repeat step 8 exporting it to see how it looks and once you have it to your liking we can move on to phase 2 now I was pretty happy with the original so I'm gonna hit command option Z twice and back to where I was we've got a good loop now phase two it's now time to add our frozen element to the shot step 9 navigate to the frame that you'd like to use as your still image we're going to do a screen grab so for me they all look pretty similar so I'm just gonna grab a random one and step number 10 to get that screen grab we're going to do a command option shift E and if you're on a PC it's gonna be ctrl alt shift E to create a new layer out of that frame so that layer we have it just pop up over here now we need to be its own layer so I'm gonna drag it up in this layers bar let me put it right here and just align it now just zoom out a little bit so that's really long just gonna shorten it so it's the same length now we just have this image on top so if I already hit play we would just see nothing it's just a still image so we need to cut our hole out to show the area of the video that we'd like to reveal I do this we're gonna move on to step number 11 creating a layer mask so hit the layer mask button when you have this layer selected and the layer mask button is right here step number 12 make sure that the mask is selected so just click on the right here we've got our black layer on top which is excellent if it's not and go ahead and press D to align black and white and then just press X so that black is on top that brings us to seven or thirteen selecting a brush so press B to select brush we're going to go ahead and zoom into the area we're gonna be working with and I just pinch on my keyboard to do so you can also do command + to zoom command minus to zoom out now we're gonna be cutting out the areas of the photo we'd like to show the video beneath and now we're gonna have a nice decently sized brush so 50 is fun and we wanted to be pretty soft so I'll leave it at 30% so now we're gonna do is we're gonna start to paint in the video you'll see this kind of moving around a little bit now to make this easier to know exactly what you're painting hit the backslash button on your keyboard and now the area of the ear and moving is gonna show up is red so I just want to see the water so I'm gonna be painting the water and the reflection we have two reflections so this and this and you never want to paint more than you need so get some of this zoom in for more detail and know that the water is gonna be sloshing around pretty high so we want to get more of it I'm gonna make my brush a little smaller as I work my hand now it's really nice to have a perfectly frozen hand so I'm not gonna select my thumb the thumb be frozen if you accidentally paint something you don't want to what we can do is we can hit the e button and that opens up our eraser we'll make the brush a little larger and we can go ahead and erase that and that's the beautiful part of creating these layer masks they're non-destructive meaning we can add and subtract very easily if we want to if you make a mistake like this take command Z and back to normal I usually just stick with softer brushes and go very small as I work around hard edges like my phone so now let's zoom out a little bit and see how it's looking so I'll hit the backslash again so I don't see the red anymore and let's play so now you'll see that my hand is perfectly frozen whereas the waters me really nicely and this is looking like a really awesome cinemagraph file export render video and we can try 15 frames per second we can try 20 we can try 30 it'll look differently with all of them just make sure you title it appropriately and let's do all them just so you can get an idea of how to look differently so this is 10 and then this is 30 you see it's a very very different look and congratulations you now have your first cinemagraph now before we make our final export I want to give you a couple tips for refining one of my favorite final touches is cropping it so you've probably shot your video on a 16:9 ratio which is the classic video ratio now I like to crop it to 4:3 or square which are popular photo ratios so it seems like more of a moving photo rather than just a still video if you're making them for Instagram it's also not a bad idea to make them with your camera shooting video vertically and then you crop it down to 8 by 10 so it takes up the most of the screen real estate on Instagram now a couple tips for posting them so if you're gonna be posting these to Instagram Instagram actually requires the video be at least 6 seconds long and often times I end up with cinemagraphs that are just 2 or 3 seconds the simple solution is just dumping this into an editing software and doubling or tripling the file until it's long enough to be posted on Instagram I also suggest that you mute these before you post them on Instagram now the reason why is for the same reason we don't like the 16:9 ratio having it silent makes it look more like a moving photo than anything and having audio that doesn't actually loop perfectly can ruin the effect now if you can make audio that perfectly loops that's amazing and not a bad idea and finally if you want to be posting these to your website or texting them to people rather than just posting on Instagram the best method is to be saving them as gifts and not video so to save this as a gift go ahead and go to file export save for web and that'll save it as a beautiful gift and finally we're gonna wrap this up with a sim agree for you if you're more advanced with Photoshop and really comfortable using brushes and masking I'd like to introduce you to a more advanced options for cinemagraphs that I love for ones like this our background is the movement well Quinn our biker is the frozen subject remember we need to have the movement be film completely isolated so if Twain even moves an inch it'll ruin the entire footage of the background because we no longer have clean without any obstructions so to solve this problem I'm gonna have Quinn come in I'm gonna focus on him grab a few seconds of video of him or I can often just take a photo of him since I'm more comfortable editing them then without switching any of the camera settings I have him leave the shot and I film the same thing without him in it so I have my clean background with no obstructions and I'll usually film these backgrounds for a good minute or two just so I have tons of footage to work with and I can choose the best part that seems to loop easily now to make this cinemagraph I loop the background per usual then I bring the photo in perfectly align it which just requires stretching it so it's the same width and center and then I start from step 9 the beginning of phase 2 where I just need to do some super detailed layer masking being very precise with the right soft brushes so that it's hard to notice that I've cut him into the shot and a little tip the magic wand tool is really helpful for these selection processes it really speeds up the work and just so you know I did speed up this entire thing it can take 5 or 10 minutes when I'm doing this really precisely I personally like superimposing a photo rather than doing a screen grab because I'm just more comfortable editing photos but if you're gonna edit the photo independently make sure you edit it very consistently with the video because if you have a photo that's super saturated and warm and the video is super cold and gray it's gonna look kind of awkward so make sure everything's still cut very consistent and that's cinema graphs now I know it may have seemed like a lot but after you shot a few of these for yourself your brain will begin functioning in the form of cinemagraphs you'll just easily identify opportunities to make them and editing them will never take more than ten or fifteen minutes even with some complex layer masking and if you're having any trouble conceptualizing how to make them don't worry I had the exact same problem when I first started just really got to practice and they'll start to make way more sense over time anyway final step of this process if you make any awesome cinemagraphs post them on instagram with the hashtag josh cats photos and tag me Josh cats so I can see your work to make me super happy to know you guys are progressing thanks to this video thanks again to movement watches for sponsoring this video and if you guys want to check out my beginner photography course because you think you like my teaching now you can do so right here it's nine hours of amazing content including Lightroom marketing your shots shooting all that great stuff anyway guys subscribe for more videos they use so much for watching and I will see you eventually

Channel: Josh Katz

Views: 44,870

Keywords: cinemagraph, cinemagraphs, tutorial, photo comes to life, photoshop, photoshop tutorial, cinemagraph tutorial, plotograph, shooting, editing, photography tutorial, josh katz, photography, photo, photo tutorial, new york city, mvmt watches, beginner tutorial, beginner, beginner photography, cinemagraphs for beginners, making cinemagraphs, flixel, photos

Id: ehteft3_jM8

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018