Lessons

Lesson Info

Cinemagraphs

So I'm just going to finish out with how to make cinema graph so moving photos and I'm going to give you a little prep for what you need to prepare kind of thinking about it beforehand how they work just a little discussion um if you check on my blogged a periodically post cinema grafts now sina graphs depends on what you want to call them and basically I think of it and my nerdy way of thinking of it harry potter fans you know how they have the newspapers with the moving photos that's that's how I think of it and they can either be taken from stills were you animate part or video where you freeze park what we're going to do today is talk about how to take video images or video captures clips and turn them into these stills and so if you watch my web say in my block I'll add some periodically I do some of my own and then I also have an animator that I work with and it's great to collaborate with somebody who's super creative his name's darren goes by design poet he's great um but here'...

s what you need you have to have your camera on a tripod okay if your image is unstable whatsoever then it's not going to work and so you're going to be capturing video and I recommend you look up online some for the kind of the best video settings but think of it like photography you want lower isos you want kind of a higher frame right one frame way around fifty frames so that would be kind of your shutter speed one fiftieth it's going to give you kind of nice smooth footage uh I just want to be careful that you don't overexpose the highlights you're not going to be able to get those back in photo shop whereas I can pump up details a little bit in the shadow so you're going to record and what you're looking for ideally is when just part of the frame has movement so common was the most popular one is moving here uh hair blowing in the wind and everything else is frozen or moving in movement in a dress I've also seen ones where somebody is sitting on a bench flipping through a book the only thing that's moving are their hands and the pages of the book or someone else where everything else is still but there is one bike moving in the background so you're looking for something small to be moving and here's why these air exported as animated gifs okay or animated guests whatever you want to say for them they need to be small you're typically aiming to export these under one megabyte in size that's ideal you want them under a megabyte so that when somebody brings them up on html page the load quickly otherwise it looks like a still on somebody kind of just looks away immediately if it's more than a megabyte it'll take a while the load and they won't even know that it's something beyond just a still image so the reason that you're looking for something small is your file will be smaller if you only have a little piece of motion you're only having to save that information for a tiny bit of the moving piece you also want a movement that's easy to repeat I prefer my cinema gramps where they loop continuously and you can't see a scene so maybe it's going to be a dress and you don't see where thie movement ended and began now I'm not going to talk about this today because it's actually involving a little bit more complicated but you can actually take your movement mirror it so it goes start to finish if that makes sense so we do's you'd have dressed go up then you flip the front the video frame so that it goes back down and it just makes kind of ah smooth movement but we're gonna start with basic so on a tri pon video you can let a long clip run because later on you can pick out the little piece that you want and you could do this all in either cs five or cia six I'm sorry fuse out there that don't have one of these you can do and final cut you can do and after effects but we're not gonna we're gonna do photo shop all right? So I'm just going to get started and just walk you through the easiest way to do this I promise if you guys see this you have video on your camera to go that's not too hard that's easy I could do that so you're going to do is you're going to open up a video file I recommend that you trim it outside of photo shop beforehand so you're not opening up a massive file because it's going to process regardless if you trim it down later it's going to take a lot of space so I have a slightly trimmed version let's take this one so this is a trim version it's still eighty six point five megabytes still big with the original file was like two gigabytes all right, so what it does is it opens up when I just hit file open open up this this video file um ideally dot movies open well, whatever your camera shoot on default if it's a dslr it'll open photoshopped problem they no problem at all so if I hit play it runs me through a kind of the entire movement that's here it looks nice um but that's way too long best case scenario for really slick, smooth and beautiful animated file you really only want like, less than a second of movement something like if you have to keep it under two seconds if you want a small file but you're aiming for something like a second, just movement of address or somebody move something moving in the background. So what I need to do first is figure out exactly what movement I want out of this frame, so if you look on the left right here where you see this little this little scrubber, this is your in point, so I'm going to pull that into roughly where I want to start and then take the endpoint employed into roughly where I wanted to end, and I'm gonna trim it, so I'm going to make it smaller, so just dealing with that information that I want a loop so I can take my scrubber here and we'll start there for now, let's see? And I can actually go to my pop out when you're on the right you see this alright to clip the pop out, I can split at play head and what that does it splits the clip and the play head is, well, the when I hit play coat scrubbing sort of saying, can it split it? Play hand, click on that original clip and hit delete so it got rid of that first part that I didn't want I'm narrowing it down to the file, and I usually just do this, and so I'm kind of narrowing down to just that perfect quick movement that looks good for may someone to scrub and I like c I don't know let's just say I like that part. I'm just gonna pick. I like that that movement of the dress and I already looked at this before, just so you know, because it was a long clips, so I watched it all the way through and looks for where I saw the nice movement in the fabric so I can go over to the right again, split at play head and delete. Okay, so now what? I have it so I hit play, I have movement of the dress, they're so looks nice, it technically is still a little bit long, but we'll leave it for now and we can always go back and change it now by default. If you guys were hitting play it probably on lee plays once through, so you can't actually see how the gift would play. It would play on repeat, so you need to make sure in your pop out menu that you have loop playback. Because you're animated gif will loop if you just have it play once people chances are loads and people missing you can't see it against you always want to have it lieut so you want to make sure you have luke playback and so here's what you're going to do for making the gift you're going to go through and you're going to find this still frame that you like best and in this instance I'm looking for where I like her face best write her pose and her face doesn't really matter about the dress because I'm going to have that moving so when you find where you like her face best and I think let's say there I like that she's looking out, arms crossed across her body, her hands to her head, you need to create a still frame from that, so by default it groups the video up here, I actually don't want it to group the videos that went right click and hit on group just it kind of messes things up later on sam's going on group all right, so I'm roughly selected where I need to be, so I'm going to go up and I need to select all and basically copy it into a new frames that's going to myself frame you want to go to select all, but you can't just copy and paste you have to actually select um edit copy merged in order for it to pick that photo if you just do copy it won't work so it has to be cop emerged and then you had paste so what it does is it just took this still frame and it put it up on top so this is a non moving file that we just grabbed um what it does when it paste it in actually I'm goingto extend this up see what's inside a little better when it pace it, pace it to the, um play head and beyond you just need to move it over because otherwise you'll have this is actually your mass sister you're still frame and you were going to unmask and review reveal movement so you actually have to shift it so the to line up and I can grab the end point set to the same length because otherwise maybe it will start moving and then it's still frame appears and then think stop moving so you have to make sure they're nice and lined up and at the right time so that's looking good and so right now when I hit play I see nothing because I put a still frame on the top so this is a part and we're very, very familiar with this where we're just going to mask so when adam ask to that top frame in damascus here adalah amounts like usual so what I need to do is I need to scrub through my video and I need to paint black which is going to hide the top layer hide the still it's going to allow the movement to show through so when a script in my video I just need to make sure I paint black wherever this dress moves otherwise it will cut like it'll move beyond and they'll still be the france still frame kind of uh weird over top of it so I'm going to paint black loosely and I know I can refine this so I need one hundred percent capacity and I usually do a sharp brush because you will just not sharp brush a soft brush because it makes it easier when you make mistakes for example you'll see in this image her hips move a little bit if you have a sharp brush like her back dances her back moves but if it's soft you don't notice it as much it's just a little wiggle versus she becomes disjointed uhm ideally you'd have heard holding completely still for this so wanna paint black? Same I slipped ok painting black and I know that I probably want to get and when has him in a little for my eyesight I probably want to get down here and I know that the dress comes up here so what I'll dio isn't gonna scrub through and see if there's any times when the dress goes out of that mask, so if I need to extend my mask so when you start in the beginning, you guys watching for me, so get cut off, see where it gets cut off, so I know, okay, gotta come back down here and that's fine, but because I want to have as a little movement as possible because all that's going to take up more space, I don't want to have my mask go beyond where it's required. So that's, why I'm scrubbing through is paying attention to the point where it goes up highest and that looks good and notice your butt moving. You see that? So I mean, ideally wouldn't have that in a perfect, uh, cinema graft, but I can just say this, and I'm going to try to get it just right right around her arm. And I went to a softer brush, lower rapacity around her back. Think it a little bit of a blend here, let's. See how that works, so okay, you know, you see it, and she would just try to blend it so I might blend of her back just a little bit. Okay, steven, go, man, it's it's tweaking, um, so I can hit play so far. And it's the cinema graphs like you're close but what's really great since we're working in photo shop, you don't have to learn after facts you don't learn anything else all the tools that you normally use in photo shop completely still apply, so we've just done an entire course in retouching I can go into a face and retouch a face that can go in and change color I can do whatever I want so I know for example that I wanted to have the aspect ratio not of a movie I want it to look like a photo so I can crop it to four by six and if I hit delete craft pixels it'll actually make my video smaller so I do want to do that if I knew I wanted to four by six so I can crop it do that alright good I'm gonna zoom in and I think I want there to be kind of a cool mood in the background so I want to pull out the greens and the yellows I wanted to look kind of deathly cool around her so I can go ahead and do what I've done this entire class so I can go to hugh saturation grab my greens do said treat migraines can go to my yellows I can de saturate my yellows and so let me give you an idea before and after looks good we've talked about before I want to focus my I n so I can grab curves dragged the curves down and paint it off of her body and off of the dress so I can go ahead here and paint off around where the dress is going to be maybe lighten it up a little bit on entry some focusing my eye and a little bit I could go ahead and if I want to add in a little bit of a colorized maybe I wanted to be a little warmer or maybe in this sense I want to be kind of cool so I can add a blue tone so you're seeing kind of it's cooler now in the trees around her but I don't want her to be cool so I can come in paint that effect off of her something like that roughly right and I'm gonna zoom in and do her retouch and I can duplicate that this bottom layer to do the recharger I could do it right on there I'm going to duplicate it for now and I convergent down if I want and if you're noticing it is a video file you could take a still when you're filming that video that you know ok it's the perfect still and then record you'd actually have a higher quality um pixels to work with within the video part the movement part isn't his high quality but when I zoomed on the web you don't really notice so tense what you're comfortable with and I'm just going to go through and clean up her skin someone to go to leighton and go lower some cloning on light and clean up your skin I can run a portraiture I can do whatever I want so you're able to use all of your tools that we've learned from retouching some coming in ms suman even a little closer looks good so far um I want to draw a little more attention to her face so I am going to increase the contrast just a bit on her face when it back up select her torso area feather and brighten up with levels could brighten up a little bit and I can pull out reds and yellows in her skin if I want I mean I could keep doing this for however long but I could also run structure so I could run a knicks effect on it pull up detail in that tree there's any effects that I want so show you kind of before and after here and so if I hit play you know I've been ableto added it like a still all right so the next thing that I want to do is I need to save it and there's there's another way to do cinema grass I'm not saying this is the only way for what you'll do after this is you can compress it toe layers you could turn each frame into a layer, you can loop it what's cool about that is let's say, for example, actually literally just got a photo from my the guy that I work with, and I collaborate with it. Does cinema graphs with me? What he did is when he converted two frames, he went into each frame and use puppet warp, and if you know how puppet warp works, he made those trees look like they're moving and warping. So it's, kind of like the crack in right looks like they're alive. We didn't use this image to use a different one, but you could do the same thing let's say that you didn't shoot video, you just had a still shot, like all gotta love this tree still shot. If you don't shoot video, go in, liquefy a little bit, or use the puppet warp, and he did animation, so it would kind of tween between those if you guys, the animation, you'd understand this a little more advanced, but then the shot, all the branches, air moving and warping. So if you were a little more artistically inclined that way, you could start from a still frame. I could do something where I had a still frame, where in the animation in the frame, slowly, her dress changes color. I mean, it could be a variety of different things, so this next step is the export process, and this is something that you definitely need to know if you want to show these online. If these air just going on an ipad or an iphone, they could be however big you want, it doesn't matter, but if they're going to be viewed online, they need to be smaller, so we're going to go up to file safer web, and this does take a very long time to process, so if you're like, oh, my computer's frozen, no it's, just business, and so my settings most of them are already set here, but I'll show you a couple things that you need. First of all, when you see down where it says image size, you want to say for however big you plan on saving it for the web, you don't want it, put it let's, say on your block and then resize it down because the file is still going to be large, so if I know my blog's, for example, is eight hundred pixels wide, I could type in a hundred pixels here and it's going to save me ah, whole lot of space, and you can see it gives me a preview. Over on the left hand side telling me my file size so I can tweak things here tio aim to get around a megabyte if I can but the next thing that you need to know cinema graphs work better with less color and that kind of killed because I love color you know that I love red um but what you're trying to do to keep file sizes small is the maximum you can do for web is two hundred fifty six colors, so if you have something with a grady int of a lot of different colors and every colors and they're it's it doesn't work so well so something that's closer to black and white or monochromatic or just more subtle colors or everything all within the same tonal range is going to give you a smaller file size and it looks better as soon as you need to have a grady in between colors and saturated colors from less saturated supersaturated you see jumps in the color because it doesn't have access to that many variations of a single color. So keep that in mind so you make sure to fifty six is going to be ideal if you have a monochromatic image you khun dropped this way down in the number of colors and save yourself a ton of space and you could do you know for eight sixteen you see which one has the best radiance between white and black so there's one um you do want to have this set on selective um this is the basically the rendering and this is how okay so like I said it has reduced colors and so you'll get those jumps right here it's the dithering algorithm how do you make those jumps look smoother and the one that's recommended I've looked this up I don't truly I haven't truly tried all the different ones generally pattern is recommended it just kind of fix the smoother transition between those colors since you have less access so hit pattern I need to make sure you convert to s rgb if you have an rgb file it's going to be massive and it does you no good online um for these and so if you're looking right now if you're looking to the size I got to I see once it converts still thinking um it's going to give me a rough size for the amount of frames that I had at this point it's still going to be over a megabyte so this is why what you're aiming for is smaller area of movements and fewer frames and then just having it loop all right the last thing that you need to make sure that this actually works uh you need to make sure here where it says looping options by default it says once and so what it will do is it'll play once and then be done and that's not what you want you wanted to loop can waiting for this thing still thinking um one of the options is, uh I think it's forever which I like that's funny it's like endlessly okay still thinking you want to click there and it should say forever I can't on dh then up in the top underneath where it says preset you need to make sure it says gift or jif file there's a couple different options so if you have it's a gif selective um pattern two hundred fifty six colors srg b and change the image size and loop forever that's what you need and then you can save it for web wow okay it's still thinking some little questions we could also thinking says I don't all right cool so the question is will from heart hurt honey, but hurt honey bee well cinema grass play on facebook and then she or he says, I suppose the better question would be should cinema graphs we shared as a video or as a photo in social media they don't play on facebook because what facebook does is it takes your your j for your gift and then converts it to j peg that's how it works so you lose all your information unfortunately it won't work and a flash file did work okay hon, I sit forever I was going to say this out, so I got to two point nine, four megabytes, so I'm going to save this while we're talking. Um and so so so let's say this is test on the desk, huh? And so what you want to do is you don't want to save it as a video file. You want to save it as you're jeff for your gift. Um, and then, um, it is displayed best in html formats like, uh, a wordpress block, something that can display html. So any place that you can normally do like your twitter profile picture, you can play animated files there so you could create a cinema graph and have it play eso anyplace where you'd see those repeated animation, you can use one of these so mine's still savings doing good is there? Uh, see beauty of the lake acid from st petersburg, florida? Is there a quick way to safe or ipad and those other kind of mobile devices and so on that you can create presets here, see how it says pre set up on the top? So when you're working with and I've had, um, you can get away with a lot more and you can actually play there's actually animated j thanks, and they're actually animated p and g's and so you can actually save out as something other than a gift and I'll give you more detail so that works really great if you wanted for example to do a fine art gallery display of animated cinema graphs you can save these out at full resolution and then have them loop and play through uh I mean well whether it's an ipad or if you haven't projecting you could do it through a quick time and just have a look forever yeah so it's still thinking other questions so far you need to view these in a browser which is what I'll show when it's time okay mcc just for people who are totally brand new to this did I miss an import step when I brought a video file to photo shop it turned into a still photo only ah what photoshopped ocean good question it has to be um see it's five extended or csx okay if she doesn't if you've seen five and it's not the extended version it probably won't work okay yep she's on c s five so sorry okay so it worked it finally thought for a while so what you'll dio uh so what you'll do to preview and see if it's looking cracked that's great guys thank you um is you drag and drop the sea is very open here you're going to drag and drop your file into a browser so it could be chrome it doesn't really matter sea dragon drop it and then it gives you the preview of what it looks like and what I would do given more time and using it, you can do this method as well if you export it for example once if you export it so that it doesn't loop, you could export it, bring it back in, flip it over as a video file so that it's smooth and have that loop forever. So when the dress ends at a high note, when you stick it and end, then it starts when it's at the high point and so it will loop smoothly right now. How I did it. Um it just kind of ends abruptly and restarts you don't have to have something that loops are loops like smoothly, you could do a full movement and then just have it start again. Um, I just tend to think that that looks more like how we process animated gifs originally, like that's, how we usually just kind of the obnoxious repeated movement over and over again versus if you see this way it tends to look like a moving photograph. And again, this is a still this is a video file that I grabbed quickly when I was shooting an editorial that ran in paper cut magazine and this is the image are those the editorial that I just shared up on my facebook page today so you can see I'm shooting an editorial lock it down on a tripod let it run for a minute or two it was thinking okay what can I do to introduce movement hair dress moon of the hand something and I don't need to do any extra work so try it next time we're doing a shoot just keep in mind that you need a small amount of movement and if you have something set up you go ahead and play with it in photo shop c s five extended or see a six six and if you have final cut pro you can also do it there as well that's it I just wanna point out also that do google plus plays cinema grabs people are saying yes yes I knew that okay that too and it's one of those those things teo there's a very large community of photographers on google plus so maybe if cinema graphs or your next new thing that might be the social media outlet where you'd share them I tended tell people on facebook hey, I've got cinema graphs and then link to my block where they confuse them awesome! We have a few sort of end of day questions starting with from baltimore who says when will you come back for another advanced retouching class at creative I've whenever whenever you want I'm surprised that you can handle that poof ten three touching you now but that's the beauty is that some people are starters but other people and that's exactly and something that I wanted to mention as well a majority of this and not saying that creative life isn't a great place to learn if a majority of things is when I'm doing all my retouching and special effects I only learned something when I figure out something I don't know I need to know and then look it up online s so I never had any retouching classes anything formal it's okay, I need to buy a book or somebody out there must know how to do it and looking them up on websites. So a lot of it's just self teaching there's not really any magical place to learn it besides making mistakes and knowing that you'll fail a lot and that's okay and then you figure out what process works for you? Very cool so we just have a few industry questions that came up throughout the day and I thought now is a good time to ask some of those kim photo asked lindsay where do you get where you find your models for your chutes? Do you find them the streets model may ham to use agencies at this point in my career I only use agencies, but I photographed people that I found on the street and I photographed girls were model made him for a long time but right now in new york there's a million agencies so I always have access to models it's really convenient this was shot in san francisco and this girl was from look a model management who paid and picks pick cyst had asked some clients use dedicated retouch er's others expect the retouched file from the photographer in your experience which of these situations is most common or dominates? So in general what I tend to dio they usually if it's a magazine and it's a magazine cover that they have a re toucher because they want consistency in the covers and how they're retouched. So if I if you're shooting safer essence magazine, they have a retouched that re touches the covers so they all look the same and have the same field most of time you treat touch yourself and what I'll do is in my invoice what I'll say is my retouching fee for these images is a thousand dollars but I usually discounted thousand dollars and like you she gave me a thousand dollar discount saying if I pass this off to re toucher you know there are professional retouching firms that are three hundred an hour you know? So maybe I'm not a professional retouching firm but I would charge one hundred fifteen hour two hundred hour and so I build that in and then discounted so they feel like oh, this photographer did us a favor or we're saving money by going with this photographer david g s when you have your feet up on a sunday morning relaxing where do you where do you typically find your inspiration? Is that through other photographers work or you know what sorts of things. Okay, now, fair question. Um, I I look at a time of photos and I look at a lot of artists and it's it's a mixture of a lot of different things. I have a presentation on my blogged underclass notes that's called in search of inspiration and it's looking in a lot of other photographers. Um, I look at a website sometimes called fashion gone rogue, and they post a new editorial every day from some place in the world that they like, I search keywords a lot of times. It comes from a magazine that has a theme so let's see, like this one wass halloween theme. Okay, so that's not super helpful because you could do whatever. And so I did a creepy tree, but other ones might be something like the theme is red or the theme is made in manhattan, so something in the city, and so what I'll do is I generally pick one element of a shoot to focus on, so maybe the entire shoot is based on hair and so I look up hair shots that I like and so okay that hair would look good on what type of model if I had that type of model not type of hair which have a clothing with real good all right, what would be a cool place to put a cool location put that subject in so I usually just pick based on a theme one element and then base everything off that element and how I think it fits my style um try to have something that's clean and bold and graphic if it has color I wanted color to be in your face if it's going to not have color I make a high contrast black and white most of time so when I'm planning the shoots I just say all right we'll take this element would build off of it but build off on away in a way that reflects my style and my portfolio kind of makes so well maybe do you have any other questions here in the audience? Yeah jen this is going to say this has been really great and all things that you have brought in these three days is just wonderful and thank you so much for coming out and doing this yes, thank you for coming appreciate it so I do I wanted to come back tio we had we talked we were talking at lunch and lindsay was saying I was a really bad photographer for the first six years, and I responded really love, and then she went on to tell me a little bit about that, and I asked her if she could share that with all of you out there because you are such a rock star, and so I love hearing people's, like how they got to hear stories so it's, one of those where I see other photographers, that they start right away, and they're awesome. Um, my assistant slash companion, jeff, look right away. He was awesome, and they were like, what the heck, I really spent more than five years kind of sucking, um, and here's. Why? Um, I was just trying to do what everyone else did, and it wasn't doing it as well as what they were doing, and it wasn't shooting what I wanted to shoot. So I was shooting, formulaic what I felt I had to shoot to make money, and I was comparing myself just to the photographers in my area and no offence, there's, plenty of good photographers in my area, but it's not expanding your mind. And so the same thing. I went to college, and I did, uh, get a degree in photography, but actually, my degree was business full, other a discussion, but looking around me and I'm comparing myself to my classmates but they're not doing fashion photography and they're also not doing anything profound as faras portrait photographer I'm comparing myself to them so fast forward I get some pretty pictures like after a few years have mastered the technicals right? I finally know how to get a picture and focus and um maybe not be totally boring but it's pretty basic so I go to london and I'm like, you know I want to be a fashion photographer I want to do cool fun stuff so I have a portfolio of pretty girls in pretty clothing kind like leaning on walls but let me tell you like I mean soon silly for five years I'm not saying like okay, first off it wasn't good I'll show oh I'll share one or two at some point with somebody what it looks like so I moved to london at least have mastered the technicals I started shooting pretty people so your portfolio gets a little better um take my portfolio to a magazine editor and he agreed to meet with me some like sweet I'm in awesome, you know, I've got this and I show up and I passed my portfolio and he flips through and so I'm assuming he does what I do know if you give me a portfolio for review I take a look at it I flipped through without saying anything because I want to see the type of work you do and figure out what's the best number. So thinking that's, what he's doing is slipping through and he closes portfolio and he passes it back to me and he says, well, I'd start again and like I've been through college, I've been shooting for stew six years, five, six years like a business, and I was like, uh, start what, again, like all happy like your portfolio, like the case? No, I mean, he meant the work in it, um and so kind of horrified, I asked why? And he said, you know, I look at portfolios all the time and you're pretty girls and their decently composed and you know, well, you know, good technicals, but I will forget you as soon as you leave is like there's nothing unique, there's, nothing with high impact, a working professional should have images of this quality as a baseline on dh then you need to do something that makes you stand out and so from you know, I could have quit or I did. I did cry who that was painful, but from there, instead of just looking at the people in my town or looking at, um the kids in my class, I started looking at other photographers and I looked what exists out there and what other, you know what other who were the people that are considered the masters? And so then every single sunday from then on, I made sure I did a personal shoot that challenged me to do something bigger, better and with higher impact for my portfolio, and as soon as they started experimenting and getting excited, it got better. I wasn't shooting just to pay the bills and I wasn't shooting just what everyone thought I should shoot and so that made all the difference and then all of a sudden I became better at the technicals and became better everything because it was something within me and pushing myself first is just like, oh, another child portrait that I have to do it, you know what I mean? So majority of my career was very weak and I'll say I went from bad to what I think is pretty decent and probably a year it was just one of those late bald moments where I realize I'm not competing against the people in front of me I'm competing at everyone in the world in the age of the internet anybody can see my photos, so it was a drastic change and I try to get better all the time I tried to replace my portfolio at least fifty percent every year try to aim for higher than that