Make it Move! Animate a Still Frame in Adobe Photoshop

1. Course Overview: Hello, and welcome. I'm Kara Plitin, and I have a question for you. Did you know that you can easily, like, so easily create an animation in Flatsa with nothing more than a single still image? And I'm going to show you how in this quick and easy class. Now, you can follow along using the images that I've linked for you to download in the projects and resources area just below this video. But if you'd like to work with your own images or if you want to choose your own stock files to try, that is totally great, too. You'll get the best results if you keep the following things in Me. We're not gonna spend a ton of time on making selections in this course, so it's best to choose images where it's gonna be really easy for you to separate your subject from background. There's always exceptions obviously, but I would say it also helps to avoid any obvious things that should be moving in a moving picture, like if there's birds in the background. I would also avoid any images where there is a setting sun or any obviously directional lighting because, as we bring the sky to life and make it move through our image, that might appear kind of straight. But hey, if you like it, you do you. Also keep in mind that you can use the sky that already exists in the scene, or if you want to, you could bring in a different sky, and that would work just as well. So download the project files or gather your own and in the next video, we're going to prep the image for animation. 2. Prepare the Image: Now that we have our files, we're going to get started by prepping the image for the animation. So out of all the different practice files that I included that I think work well for this project, pick your favorite. Open it up in Photoshop. So the first thing we need to do is select our subject. So I'm going to press the WQ to get our wizard like selection tools, and then that also gives us access to this magical button that's called Select Subject. I'm going to make sure that it is set to process on the Cloud for best results, and I'll go ahead and click Select Subject. It's going to chew for a minute, and we can see it puts a selection around her, and it does a pretty good job. There's one little spot right here that it missed. So I'm going to switch to my Quick Selection tool right here. And this works like kind of a magical brush, so I'm going to make the brush smaller by using the left bracket key. The right bracket key will make it bigger, so we can adjust the brush size. And then because I want to subtract this area from the selection, because she's currently selected, and this little pocket is not part of her. I'm going to hold down the alt or option key, which you'll notice changes the cursor to a little minus sign, and then I can get in here and just click. And when I let go, it's going to automatically select that little pocket. So that looks pretty good. We have this area in her hair up here that needs to just be double checked, right? So let's click Select and Mask, and we can see what that's looking like. If I zoom in on it. Yeah, we should clean that up. So I'm going to press that left bracket key to make my brush a little smaller. I'm going to grab this tool right here, which is the refine edge brush. And now I can just paint over this and photoshops going to give it another go and do a better job of selecting it. Now, it doesn't have to be totally perfect because we're not replacing the sky. We're just animating it. So it's going to be there anyway. So I'm not going to lose sleep over the stuff too much. We'll go ahead and leave this to output to selection. That's great. We'll click Okay. I'll press Commander Control zero to fit it on the screen, and this looks good. So next, we're going to now that our selection is complete, we just want to jump a copy of it up into its own layer. And actually, we're going to cut it from the background layer at the same time. So instead of Commander Control J, which would just duplicate it, we're going to press Shift Command or Control J. So you can see here that we've actually ripped her out of the background and into her own layer. So if we hide her, we now have a hole in the background layer. To fill in that hole, we want to target that background layer, and we can re grab the selection that we made around her by just command or control clicking on her thumbnail. So we're still on the background layer, but we've got a selection around her. For the next step, we want to expand the selection a little bit. It'll be helpful in a minute. You'll see why. So we're going to go to the select menu. We're going to choose modify expand. And let's type in a value here of something like 40 pixels. What you choose here is going to depend on the size of your image. If it's a really high resolution image, you'll need a higher number. If it's a low resolution image, you'll need a smaller one. So if you type in a number and you hit okay, and you don't like what you get, just undo it by pressing commander Control Z and give it another try. So here, this is what I want. I just want a little bit of a border around her. And now we're going to use Generative fill to fill that in. Pretty cool, right? So let's make sure we have our generative fill task bar opened up. We'll go to the window menu, and we'll choose contextual taskbar. That's what it's called contextual taskbar. It's always so hard to say. Anyway, we've got this selected. Now, all we need to do is on this little task bar that pops up. We're just going to click Generative Pill. We're gonna leave the prompt blank, and we'll click Generate. And we're just going to wait. Photoshop's going to work its magic. And look at that. She just disappeared. So now we can fill this in with one of three different possibilities. So I'm looking through these Ooh. Hard to say which one I like best. I don't know. I guess I'll go with version number two. So when we're happy with our version, then we're going to go ahead and merge this layer down into the background by pressing command or control E to eat them up, so they're all in one. So now that we've done all this, we have our subject isolated on her own layer, and we have our background with the whole from our subject magically filled in using Adobe's generative fill. Isn't that just amazing? Join me in the next video, and we're going to prep the sky for a seamless repeat. 3. Make the Sky Seamless: All right, so we've got our subject separated. We filled in the hole on the background. Now we're going to leave her hidden here for a moment. And just to make sure we don't have any weird things happening in case you've manipulated this elsewhere or you're working on who knows what image? We are going to just do a quick crop on the image. So I'm going to press C for the crop tool. And I'm just going to leave this set to ratio, and just I'm not cropping anything other than the actual existing size of the image. Okay. But we want to make sure that this option right here is turned on. So delete cropped pixels needs to be turned on, and then we'll just go ahead and crop it. So we're just making sure that we don't have any extra stuff floating around on a pasteboard somewhere. All right, so now that we've done that, let's see what size image we are working with. And one way to do that is to check under image. We're going to go to image, image size. And here we can see our image in terms of pixels. And actually, what I want to do here is resize this just so it's a little easier to work with. So I'm going to make sure that resample is turned on, and I'm going to come down here to width, and I'm going to type in 2000 and set this to pixels. And that will just make things a little bit easier for demonstration purposes. So we'll go ahead and click that. And also, now that we know the width of the image, that's going to help us out in our next step. So what we need to do to make it possible for our sky to just seamlessly flow through. It's going to just kind of go around, like on a carousel. In order to do that, we need to make the seam invisible. And in order to access the seam, we need to offset the image. So it's important that we know the width, in this case, 2000 pixels, because we want to offset it exactly half of that. So we're going to come up here to the filter menu, and we're going to choose other and we're going to choose offset. So because this is a 2000 pixel image, we're going to just type in a horizontal offset of 1,000 pixels. So that should show us a seam right here down the middle. Now, if your image is a bigger number or some difficult number that is not so easy to just calculate on your own, you can also just type in whatever the width is, in this case, it's 2000, and then you can just type slash two, and Photoshop will do the math for you. How cool is that? Now we have this line down the middle of our image, and that's exactly what we want. We have this set to wrap around and vertical is left at zero, and we'll click Okay. Okay, we're so close. So this is essentially the seam now. Basically, what the offset filter does is it takes our sky in this case, and it shifted it halfway over, and then it cut off the piece that was off the canvas, and it rotated, and flipped it around and brought it over on the other side. So now we can see what the seam would look like. And we can see it's very obvious. So we're going to fix that by pressing for our Marquee tool. And then I'm just going to come over here and I'm going to click and drag to make a selection, and I might make it a little bigger, something like this. So we want to give photoshop some room to work with because what we're going to do is ask it to use AI to fill this area in and blend the left side of the image with the right side of the image. So we still have our contextual taskbar open. So we're going to come back here, and again, we'll choose Generative fill. We'll leave the prompt blank and just click Generate. And then we cross our fingers and hope that it works out well. And there it is. There is one possibility. Here is another possibility and yet a third possibility. So I don't know which one I like best, probably this one. Now we want to merge that down into the background again. So I'm going to press command or Control E, and there we go. And now our background is going to be seamless when it repeats. But we need to duplicate it so that it's twice as wide. To do that, we're going to press Commander Control J. So we just made a copy of it right on top of itself. Then we're going to grab our move tool by pressing the letter V for M V. And we're just going to take the sky layer, and we're just going to drag it straight over to the edge of our document. So I'm going to hold shift to keep it in line. And you see this, I'm just moving it over. And you can see my purple smart guides turning on. That's important because I want to make really, really sure that I'm lining this up precisely on the edge of this document. I don't want a gap. I don't want to be like over here somewhere. I want this right on the edge. So if you look carefully, you can see a magenta guide vertically on the edge of the image. So that's how I know this is in the right place. Now, if you don't see those guides, you can go to view show smart guides. So those are the smart guides. We want to make sure those are on. All right. So once we are pretty sure we have that in the right spot. Before we merge this, we need to unlock this background layer. So we're going to do that by clicking on the little lock icon. Then let's go back to our background copy layer, and now we can merge it down by again pressing command or Control E. So now to check ourselves and make sure we don't have any gaps there, grab the move tool, and if you pull this over, you should just see a perfect image. No gaps, right? If you have a gap, just undo it and go back to the part where you moved it a little too far and tuck it right up against that edge. Alright, so we can drag this back to its starting point. So but we see what we're working with, right? If I zoom out, and I press Commander Control T so you can see the whole image, this is what we have. So This is how our image, I think started, right? And then we offset it, blended this together, and then took the whole thing and duplicated it like this. So now, it can roll through the image like this, and it'll get to this point, and then it will just repeat endlessly, and there will be no seams. It's going to be pretty amazing. Alright. But for now, we want this up against the right edge. All right. So at this point, we are ready to animate this. Join me in the next video, and we'll bring it to life. 4. Make it Move!: All right, the first thing we need to do is open up our timeline panel. So we're going to go to Window timeline. And over here, you should see a button in the middle, and it either says create video timeline or it might say create frame animation. So if it says, create frame animation, then you're going to want to click this little carrot and choose video timeline. Create video timeline. And then that doesn't actually do anything. You have to actually click to then generate the timeline. So by default, Photoshop creates a five second animation. So what we're looking at here is our image over time. And now we can actually turn her back on in the Layers panel. So we have our two layers here, and they are also down here in the timeline. And we're going to leave her layer alone, and we want to make sure that we are on the Cloud sky layer in the timeline. So you can select that layer in the Layers panel or just click on it in the timeline. It ends up being the same thing. Before we get cracking at this, let's make sure that we have the set with about a 50% resolution for playback. And then we want to make sure that loop playback is enabled. So that is found under this little cogwheel right here. Other important things to know about the timeline are this little slider right here. This will basically let you zoom in on the timeline or Zoom out. So I'm just going to set my timeline about here so that all 5 seconds just fit nicely on my screen. All right, so I told you this was easy, and I wasn't kidding. All we need to do is set two key frames. In order to set the key frames, we need to enable key framing. And we want to enable that on the cloud layer. So with the cloud layer active, we're going to twirl open this little carry it right here. And these little stopwatches are the key framing. So there's three properties that we could choose to animate, position, opacity, or style. In this case, we're just going to animate position. Key frames tell Photoshop where a layer should be, in this case, the cloud layer, where the position should be at key moments in the animation. And our animation is so simple. It only has two key moments, the beginning and the end. So all we have to do is tell photoshop where the sky layer should be at the beginning and where it should be at the end, and Photoshop will figure out all the in between stuff. So to enable those position key frames, we're going to click this little stopwatch here. And we want to make sure that our playhead is at the beginning of our timeline, and we're going to click, and that action of just clicking that stopwatch puts this little diamond right here. This is the key frame. So Photoshop now knows where the cloud layer should be at the beginning of the timeline. Next, we're going to jump the playhead all the way to the end. So I'm just literally clicking on the playhead and dragging it till it doesn't drag anymore. And now we're going to auto generate that second keyframe by simply moving the cloud layer. So I've got my move tool, and I'm just going to click and drag all the way to the end. Here you can see the end. I want to have that just right up against the edge of the document. It should hopefully snap right up there for us. If it doesn't go to view and enable Snap two, Document bounds. And then we want to make sure Snap is on. So once we have now positioned this at the end, right? So I've got it up here against the end. Photoshop knows that this position is different than where it started, so it automatically makes that key frame. And that, my friends, is all there is to it. So we're done. We want to see how this looks. Are you? Ready to be amazed. Now we're just going to come over here and hit play. And there goes our sky. And look at that. When it gets to the end, it's going to loop back around. It might have a little stutter in the first time because it's rendering. But you can see now that it's rendered, it will just play through and seamlessly animate forever. That is the coolest, right? Congratulations. You just animated a photograph. And in the next video, I'm going to show you how you can save this and put it out into the world. 5. Export Your Moving Image: Alright, so first thing is we should stop this from playing before we go nuts. So I'm gonna hit the stop button right here. So we have play, and the play button turns into stop while it's playing. Alright, so first thing we want to do is save the PSD version of this. So that is our working file. So we're going to choose file. We'll choose Save As, and put this wherever we want to put it. I'm going to call it skateboard animation. And we want to make sure that we choose Photoshop for the format. It should pop up automatically. And then click Save. Alright, so that saved our working file, but that is not the file that we would post online or share anywhere because you have to have photoshop to open it. So there's two different ways that we can save this. We can save it as an MP four, a movie file, or we can save it as an animated gift. So let's take a look at both. To save this as an MP four, we're going to come to the burger menu here in the timeline panel, and we're just going to choose Render Video. So simple, right? It's going to say a bunch of stuff here. We can choose where we want to put it. So I'll put this pack on my desktop along with everything else under the sun. One thing you want to check here is what you've got set for size. In this case, I'm going to save this out as the document size. So that's going to be its existing size of 2000 pixels by 1,333 pixels. That's it. Then we're going to hit Render, and Photoshop's going to send it. And that's it. We'll take a look at that in a minute. In the meantime, let's save this as a gift. Now for gifts, we probably really want to downsize this. So let's do that real quick. Image image size. Let's make sure resample is enabled. So you can make this gift whatever size you want, but to post it to the projects below so we can all see it and cheer you on. It's got to be less than eight megs when it's animated. So to just make that an easy target to hit, I'm going to set the longest side to just 300 pixels, and then we'll click. So you now it got really tiny on our screen. But it's going to be great when we export it. So to do that, we're going to choose File Export, save for web. There's a lot of different ways you can do this, but this gives us the ability to see it and it's file size before we send it out into the world. So up here, we can choose the format. By default, yours might say JPEG. We want to make sure we choose gift. The maximum number of colors that a gift can have is 256. So if that works for you file size wise, that's great. You can also drop this down, and you can kind of get away with more than what you might say here. So just to prove it to you, I'm going to export this with just 64 colors. You can see that down here, that gives me a file size of three megs. To post it here on the skill share projects for this course, it's got to be less than eight. So this will be fine. Over here, we can confirm the size, and actually, you can change the size when you're here, too. So if you forgot and you got in here and it was 2000 pixels still, you could just type in 300 pixels for the longest side. In this case, that's the width. And it'll take a minute, but photoshop will chew on it and resize it right here. Down here, under looping options, we want to make sure that it is set to forever. And if we want to play it back real quick, we can hit the play button here. And that looks great. So you might be tempted to click Done, but that will just close this window. So we want to make sure we click Save, and I'll put this on the desktop with everything, and I'll go ahead and save it. All right, let's take a look at those files and see how they look. So here is our MP four, so I'm going to open this in QuickTime Player. That is looking beautiful. And here is our animated gift. It's very tiny because it's only 300 pixels, but it sure looks great. 6. Share Your Work!: So I hope you enjoyed that tutorial. It's amazing what you can do with just a simple existing still photograph, right? I would love to see your work. So whatever project you made, whichever one of the project files that I supplied, or if you made one with your own images, please post them down below under the projects. You want to post the gift version, so it will show up and we'll all be able to see your animation and applaud your creation. Remember that to satisfy the maximum file size upload of eight megs, make your image 300 pixels on its longest side. And you might need to drop the colors down as low as maybe 64. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Caro Plitni, and until next time, happy photoshopping.