Tutorial Description
In yesterday’s episode we showed you everything you need to know for shooting video to be used in a cinemagraph, and today we’ll bring it all together in Photoshop! This is a complex tutorial, so you may need to pause and/or re-watch it to get everything down.
Instructions for an Awesome Cinemagraph
Once you bring the video into Photoshop find the spot on your Timeline rwhere you want the start point and end point to be, and Trim the points to those places.
Now comes the fun part where you can decide what stays still andw hat moves. Create a New Layer and use your Brush Tool to paint over the area the will move in final cinemagraph. You don’t have to do every Frame, but the more accurate the better. You can later use this as a Layer Mask later to define what is visible.
Once you finish painting go the end of the timeline, make the layer with the Color invisible, and create a new stamp-visible layer (Shift Alt Com E).
Bring that stamp-visible layer all the way to the left. This will define the area that stays completely still in your final animated GIF.
Next step is to move the layer with the area you painted above the others and turn it back visible. Make it a selection by holding down Command and clicking on the layer. Once it is selected click on the layer below it and then make it into a layer mask by clicking on the layer mask icon. Hit Com I to Invert that mask. You’re through with the hardest part! You can now delete the layer with the paint on it.
Because the magic wand moved slightly in the video we’re going to mask that in by painting white on the Layer Mask.
The cool thing about a cinemagraph is you can treat it just like a regular image. Retouch, add Color toning, Textures, Vignettes, whatever you like. These will apply throughout the entire Timeline.
Saving the File
Click on File-Save for Web and Devices to save out the file. Saving it as a GIF will mean it can be an Animation online. There are different ways to determine color and quality, and the best settings I’ve found are GIF, Adaptive, and Noise in the drop down options.
With every GIF you might want to try adjusting each to get the one that works best. Make sure you zoom to 100% to get an accurate preview of what it will look like. make sure looping options is set to Forever, and then hit Save. This might take awhile!
You can then view it using any Web browser.
Good luck, please share what you come up with!
