Creating A Cool Cinemagraph In Photoshop

On this video Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE shows how to create a s great Cinemagraph (or moving still image) in a GIF format.

As we have noted in the past, Cinemagraphs are a combination of stills and videos – think about them as moving images – most of the image is frozen like a still image however a specific part has motion. Cinemagraphs are usually saved as GIF files and displayed online as unique artistic looking media. In recent years this field evolved and you can find more and more Cinemagraph artists (you can check out some interesting ones on Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg website).

Smith starts by looping the video (which is the basis for the GIF), next the idea is to duplicate the video and make a stills image out of it by moving it away from the video group. Now we change the video layer so we can temporarily distinguish between the two and add a layer mask on the stills image (white) and paint in black over only the areas where we would like to see movement.

Next we remove the change we made to the video layer and save as a GIF (with save for web) – super simple and cool. You can save it to your computer or if you want to upload it you can save it to an online storage and get a link (Smith recommends giphy.com).

This is not the first time we are looking at creating a Cinemagraph. Howard Pinsky demonstrated in a super short tutorial how to create a Cinemagraph so if you want a 2 min short guide – check it out here.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section. You can find more PhotoshopCAFE videos here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.