From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Creating cinemagraphs - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Creating cinemagraphs

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- To create a cinemagraph where one portion of a video is in motion while the rest of the image stays still, we're going to use this video of the river. In Bridge, I'll just drag it down to the dock and then over to Photoshop in order to launch it. We could also use the file menu and then open a video file into Photoshop. So the video clip appears as a video group in the layers panel, and we can see the video in the timeline. If the timeline panel isn't showing, choose window and then timeline. Now, this video also has audio in it, so before we play it, I'm going to mute that by clicking on the arrow at the end of the clip. There are two icons, one for video, and the other's for audio. I'll choose mute audio and then tap enter to apply that. The current time indicator is at the beginning of the clip, so if we click on the play button, it will go ahead and play the video. Alright, I don't think we need all 14 seconds, so in order to trim the end of the clip, I'm going to click on the end and then just drag to the left to shorten it, and I'm going to watch the heads up display, and when it gets to 10 seconds, that should be just fine. Alright, I'm going to move back to the beginning of the clip by moving the current time indicator to the beginning of the timeline, and then we need to select this frame and then paste it so that we have a still image on top of the video. To do this, I'll choose select all, and then edit, copy merged, and then edit and paste. Now, because I pasted this and the layer that was selected was inside the video group, Photoshop automatically added this layer to that same group, but I actually want to stack it on top of the video in the timeline, so from the layers panel, I'll select layer two, and drag it out of the group by dragging it above it. I'll also just rename this still for still image. Then in the timeline, I'm going to drag the still image to the beginning and then I'll click and drag on the end in order to make both the still image and the video the same length. So now when we click play, we can see that nothing is changing because the still image is hiding the video layer below it. So I'll return to the beginning of the timeline, tap the B key to select my brush, and on the still layer, I'm going to add a layer mask. Now I want to be sure that I am painting with black. I've got a large brush, and let's just paint in this area here. So by hiding this area of this still image, we're going to be able to see the video below. So now when I click play, we can see the video moving in that small area of the image. Alright, I'm going to tap the space bar to stop. You can also tap the space bar in order to play. Let's go back to the beginning of the timeline and I'm going to use command Z on Mac, control Z on Windows in order to undo the brush stroke. I'm going to switch to the gradient tool by tapping on the G key, and then in the options bar, I'll right click and choose reset tool. Now with video, I'm going to want to switch from the gradient to the classic gradient. I'll also select the reflected gradient and then I'm going to click and drag out in the image area. If we want to see the mask that we just created, we can either preview it by holding down the option key on the Mac or the alt key on Windows, and clicking on the mask. I'll click on the I again, or we can use the backslash key, and that will display the mask as a red overlay. Now I want to reposition the mask over time, so I'm going to unlink the mask from the layer in the layers panel, tap the V key to select the move tool, and then drag it over to the left side. Making sure that I'm at the beginning of the timeline, I'll use the disclosure triangle in order to view all of the different options that I can key frame over time. I'll click on the stopwatch to the left of the layer mask position. Then we can move forward in time and use the move tool in order to reposition the mask to the right side of the document. Now when we go back in time, we can see that that layer mask is going to move over time. I'll tap the back slash key again to hide the red overlay and then tap the space bar in order to play this. While I like the effect where it looks like the water's kind of being thawed or unfreezing, by the time it gets to the end of the video clip, I'd also like to see all of the water moving to the left of the mask. So I'm going to tap the B key to select the brush tool. Making sure that I'm at the end of the timeline, I'm going to paint in the mask, and that's going to enable me to see the video at the end. So now as we scrub through, we can see that it looks a little bit more like it's just thawing it all at once. I'll tap play again, and we can see the effect as the mask moves over time. Excellent. So at this point, I would want to choose file and then save as in order to save the PSD file. So I'll call this River_01, saving it back to the Animations folder as a Photoshop document. Then in order to export a video, I'll choose file, export, and render video. We can select a folder as well as rename it, and we can choose between outputting it as a video or a Photoshop image sequence. I'll choose the Adobe Media Encoder and it will go ahead and output it the same size as the original document. I'll want to be sure to output all of the frames, and then we can render our video. Now when we return to Bridge, we can see the original MP4 plus the Photoshop document, and now the newly rendered cinemagraph, and we can even play that over in the preview area. So there you go, a quick way to create a video where only a portion of the video is moving over time.

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