In this video editing tutorial in Premiere Pro CC and Photoshop CC, Alli shows you how to create an animated photo by separating the image into specific layers that can then be keyframed and animated! The result is a fun looking animated picture! Enjoy!
Hey, I’m Ally. In this video, we’re going to bring a photo to life by creating different layers and animating them using Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Now you could do all of this in Photoshop but I like to bring Premiere Pro into the mix because I find it to be more precise when working with scaling layers.
Okay so let’s start in Photoshop with our photo. The first thing we’re going to do is in the layers panel. Select the photo and press command or control J on your keyboard to make a copy of it. I always like to keep the original of my photo locked and turned off just in case I need to reference it. So now let’s select our original copy layer and the first thing we’re going to do is trace around this. Do here so that we can remove him from this shot. To do that we’re going to choose the pen tool and as we draw around him you want to be as precise as you can be because we are going to be using the trace-out copy of him a little bit later. So let’s press z on our keyboard to zoom in and we can press the space bar on our keyboard to get the hand tool up, and then drag our image down. Now we can choose the pen tool by pressing p on our keyboard I’m gonna start at his foot here and create these points tracing around him.
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What I did here was tracing around him as precisely as I could so press P for the pen tool. If you want to move an anchor point you’ve already placed, what you can do is hold down command on your keyboard if you’re on a mac or control if you’re on a PC. Click on it to drag any of these points out to move them around.
To connect the path here, we will click on that very first anchor point that we placed. I’ll press z on my keyboard and hold down the alt option key click a few times to zoom out. So we have our path traced around this guy. Let’s press p again because we need to have our pen tool active for the next step. Right-click and choose to make a selection. Feather radius 0.5 pixels is fine. This will make the edge a little less hard around the guy. Press ok.
Next, let’s go over to our layers and select the original copy layer. Press command c on our keyboard to copy and command v to paste. This dude has been pasted on a new layer where it says layer one. Let’s double click so that we can rename this layer. I’ll just turn the original copy back on. Select the original copy layer, hold command or control down on your keyboard and select the dude layer. Let’s just turn the dude layer off. It’s kept that selection of the dude. Now what we can do is go up to edit choose to fill and make sure content says content-aware, okay and it looks like content-aware did a pretty good job of just creating the background in place of this guy. So let’s grab the spot healing brush tool and press command d or control d on our keyboard to deselect this path and we will spot heal the areas that stand out very obviously. This doesn’t have to be perfect because we are going to be placing the dude back in this general area. As we start to bring the picture to life there is the chance that parts of this content-aware created a chunk of background here. You do want to spend a little bit of time and just make it look a little more natural. I’ll press z and then alt on my keyboard to zoom out.
Difference Between Premiere And Photoshop
The next thing that we’re going to do is trace around the frame of this cave here so that we have the cave as its own layer and the valley as its own layer. Let’s use the polygonal lasso tool i find this is the easiest tool to use when you’re working with tracing straight edges. So I’ll start tracing around the frame of the cave. The more precise we can be tracing around these edges the better the outcome. I’m making sure that our original copy layer which is this layer is still selected. Right click on the image and choose layer via cut, and that has let’s just turn off the original copy that has created a new layer with the valley portion of the layer cut out. Turn the original copy on and layer one off. That’s also given us the cave frame here on its own layer.
Now let’s rename the original copy cave and turn back on layer one name layer one valley. We’ll turn on each of these layers, go up to file and save as cave image and save it as a PSD file. Let’s pop over to Premiere Pro and in the project window, right-click, select import, choose our cave image open, and where it says import as click on the drop-down menu. Let’s choose sequence the dude layer the cave layer and the valley layer are all check marked because they were the three layers we had visible in photoshop. So they’ll be individually imported into Premiere and a sequence will be created for us. Press ok.
We have the cave image folder in the project window. Let’s click the drop-down menu and double click on the cave image sequence to open it up. Let’s drag these three layers open. Now I want to work in the 1920×1080 timeline and the sequence that we created will be the resolution of these photos. We can confirm that by going up to sequence and selecting sequence settings. The original image was 4928 by 3264. We’re going to adjust the default frame size to 1920 by 1080. Press ok.
Now our sequence is set to the video resolution that I like to work with but because our image was a much larger resolution each of these layers is pretty zoomed in. In this 1920×1080 timeline sequence and this is actually ideal when you’re animating images because when we scale into these images. As long as we’re not going overboard, we won’t see a loss in image quality. I’m going to select the dude image and up in effect controls where it says scale. Change it to 40. Let’s right-click on the dude image, press copy, select the other two layers to right-click paste attributes make sure motion is checked. Press ok and now the sizing of all three of our images is the same and fits within the frame here. This is a great starting point for us to start scaling and animating these layers.
Let’s begin with the valley layer, making sure our cursor is at the very beginning of the image in effect controls where it’s a scale let’s scale way into 75. Let’s press the toggle animation button here to set a keyframe. Press the down arrow on our keyboard to go to the end of that image, the left arrow to go in one, and let’s scale-out to 65. A keyframe has been set in that position and we’re also going to adjust the position here. On this side of the image the end of it, we’re going to keep our x-axis at 960. Let’s click the toggle animation button to create a keyframe. Now we’re going to go back to the beginning of this image by pressing the up arrow on our keyboard and let’s change the beginning position x-axis to 1000 so that the valley subtly moves to the left. See how the valleys scaling out and moving to the left. That’s what we want next let’s work on the cave layer so select it and under effect controls let’s click on the scale toggle animation button to set the key from there and let’s move the position of the cave over a little bit to 950. Set that keyframe down arrow on our keyboard to go to the end of the image and the left arrow to go in one and let’s zoom in a little by bringing scale up to 45. Let’s move the position of the cave to the right and set it at 985 so now the valley is moving in one direction as the cave is moving in the opposite direction. This will create a perspective shift which will make these different layers animating more visually appealing.
Let’s bring our cursor to the beginning and with the dude layer what I want to do here is move him away from this point of the cave a little. Let’s drag his position to 900, so 900 is his official starting position since we moved the position of the cave by 35 from left to right and scaled the cave out by 5. We’re gonna do the same thing with the dude layer so that he follows the movement of the cave throughout the animation. Up in effect controls, I’m gonna click the toggle button to keep the scale starting at 40. Let’s click the toggle button to set the position beginning at 900 down arrow in one to go to the end of the clip. Now we want to adjust the position by 35. Let’s type in 935 and we’ll change the scale to 45 set that keyframe and let’s check this out.
There is one more thing I want to do and that adds some text behind our subject. So push t which is the keyboard shortcut for text and in caps locks type the word Canada. Select that pop over to our essential graphics panel if you can’t see it go up to windows. Make sure it’s check marked. So we’re in the edit tab in our essential graphics panel. Drag down a bit where it says text I’m going to type in Roboto. Let’s increase the size of our text using this slider to 200. Now let’s grab our selection tool I’m going to drag Canada over to the left a little bit. On our timeline, we have one frame of this text so let’s drag it out to the same duration as our images here and drag it underneath the dude layer. Now it’s sitting behind him I think it also would look cool to have this tech show up behind the cave so we’ll just bring the cave layer above the text as well. Since this guy’s standing in the center and kind of blocking the text a lot let’s grab our text tool again click right after the and press spacebar twice to create some space in between. Grab our selection tool and adjust this word to your liking. I’m happy with that because even though you can’t see all of the letters in their entirety, your brain can pretty quickly figure out which each letter is and the word that’s being spelled.
The last thing that I want to do here is go back to the effect controls panel, and work with adjusting the scale of the vector motion because this will allow us to manipulate the text without affecting the quality of it. So cursor’s at the beginning of the layer cool let’s press the toggle button beside scale to start at 100 down on our keyboard. Left arrow to go in one and scale that text down to 90. Let’s check out the final result and there you go. That’s how you bring a picture to life by creating layers and animating them.
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Thanks and we’ll see you in another video.
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