New Assignment: Creating Animated Gif's and Cinemagraph's

Hello Students,

Your new assignment is an introduction to making animated Gifs, and then harnessing your photo skills to create a cinemagraph. 

What is an animated Gif? A Gif file is a web safe file format that has a cool feature, it can have different frames like a video, you can also change the playback speed and duration per frame. Unfortunately they can't have sound.

This animated gif is a repeater. The frames repeat over and over.

What is a Cinemagraph? A Cinemagraph is just a fancy digital photography term for an animated Gif that has the appearance of a still image (graph) with small portions of the image appearing to be moving or animated (cinema). Some Cinemagraphs will loop the animation constantly, some repeat with a delay to give the viewer a surprise when the photo they are looking at suddenly turns and looks back at them.

This cinemagraph is made from the frames of a movie and has a very short loop of just the eyes blinking...

This cinemagraph is made from the frames of a movie. Parts of the image were masked over the moving segments and video loops were created in a motion graphics program. The loop isn't seamless but the effect is eerie.

This cinemagraph is made from the frames of a movie as well. The first frame is held for a few seconds before the movement begins to add to the shock value.

Gif and Cinemagraph Assignment:

Part A

• Create an animated gif, you can use previous photographs to make a timed slideshow, or a short animation with sequential photos. 
• Must use your own images for this assignment. 
• Follow the instructions below. 
• This is just a quick project to get you use to creating gifs. The final gif must display on your blog full size in order for animation to work. 
• Create the gif at a normal size then scale down before uploading

Part B

• Create a cinemagraph style animated gif.
• Use the Continuous Shooting mode on camera for rapid fire shooting. Video camera on a tripod may also be used if needed.
• Try to create an effect where just one part of the image is moving, such as eyes moving/blinking or the head turns and looks at the camera.
• Check out http://anaestheticdiscourse.com/?p=1011 and http://fernandojbaez.com/cinemagraph-tutorial/ for tips on making cinemagraph style images.
• See more examples here: http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com/tagged/gif

How to make an animated Gif with Photoshop CS5:

• Launch Photoshop
• FILE / OPEN a new document at your desired size, I made mine at 200X180 Pixels. It's a good idea not to make Gif files too large, otherwise they can take along time to load over an internet connection.
• Your animation can be a series of images, photos etc. You can hand draw each frame the animation also. The key is to set up separate layers that you will turn into frames of animation. Im using some pictures I took of my dog.

• Click your top Layer, then while holding SHIFT click on your bottom Layer to select all layers
• On your Animation Palette Sub-Menu select Make Frames From Layers
• If you don't see individual frames in your Animation Palette, go to the Sub-Menu and select Convert To Frame Animation
• You can now designate individual durations on each frame.
• Go to FILE / SAVE FOR WEB AND DEVICES to export your animation as an animated Gif file. Make sure to set your looping options to forever.

• Open your Gif file in a web browser to test it. Here's my result:

- Mr. W

Student Work Samples - Dutch Angle Portraits

New Assignment: Color Channel and Blending Mode Manipulation

Hello Students,

Fine art photography and experimental photo techniques like infrared photography can be created with Photoshop. Part of the key to tapping into the power of photoshop is understanding Color Channels, and how layers can be manipulated with Blending Modes. In this project you will convert your Color Channels to Layers filled with the colors of your choice, and then experiment with different blending modes. The results will be surprising. The idea here is to be creative and try to achieve an artistic exposure effect.

Digital images are created with 3 channels of color, Red, Green and Blue. You will convert the color channels in your image into colored layers, and then manipulate them with blending modes.

Experiment with filling red layers with blue colors, or green with yellow and then changing the blending modes.  In this image I used a Gradient to achieve my desired effect of drawing the eye into the center of the flower

Color Channel and Blending Mode Experimentation Assignment:

Convert Color Channels to Color Layers:

• Open a photograph of your choice. Chose a photo that shows rich colors.
• Open Layer palette and Channels Palette side by side
• Select Red Channel to view that channels value in greyscale
• Command-Click the Red Channel Icon to turn it into a Selection
• Click on the RGB Channel to restore to full color
• Make a new layer, click your Color Icon and create a new Layer. Fill that Layer with Red.
• Hide that layer and repeat that process until you have a layer that represents each color in the Color Channel, Red, Green and Blue

Your Layer Palette should look like this when complete. You can change the white layer for a black one to achieve different results

• Create a layer of white and place behind your Red, Green and Blue Layers
• Change the Blending Mode of the top Layer until you find a desirable result
• Continue changing blending modes and re-arranging color layers and save 10 different versions that you find artistically pleasing
• Post the 10 versions to your blog

Original

Have fun!

- Mr.W

Student Work Samples - Double and Multiple Exposure Techniques