Create The Endless Loop of Cinemagraph in Photoshop

Hi there, this is Unmesh from PiXimperfect. And today I'm going to share with you how to make your images move endlessly, infinitely by creating an animated GIF or GIF, depending upon how you pronounce it, in Photoshop. So without any further ado, let's get started. Back in the mystical, magical world of Photoshop and as usual if you want to go ahead and download this photo and follow along, you guys already know where to check the links.. I'm not even gonna say this time. Okay, so here we have

the photo. We need the smoke. Look at the hot coffee. Let's pretend there is hot coffee in there and there is smoke coming out. Correction. It's not actually smoke. Smoke is created from combustion. This is going to be hot vapour. So I'm going to go to my Finder or Explorer and we have a stock video called Vapour from the Surface of Hot Coffee. Alright, let's just simply drag it and drop it over the canvas. Now, it's a proper stock video of vapour that I downloaded from Envato. I have an unlimit

ed plan there and I highly recommend it. And by the way, I pay for that out of my own pocket. This is not sponsored. I recommend that because they have unlimited stock photos, videos, Photoshop plugins, presets, Lightroom presets, assets, 3D assets and I don't know what not. Do go ahead and check it out. I will link them in the description. Some of my favourite actions or brushes. They also have brushes I guess. But, you would need to check that out. However, if you're looking for free alternati

ves, I found some close free alternatives and I have linked them for your convenience in the description. So do check them out. Now once we have dropped the stock video, we can place it in the centre and just hit enter for now. All right, let's turn it off for a moment we need to draw some guides. Now, to draw the guides press Ctrl or Command + R to see the ruler if you cannot see it already, and then zoom in to the cup. So let's zoom in. And from the ruler, let's draw some guides. So I'm going

to drag one and place it around the inner edge. Same on the other side. Alright. And then place one here from the largest opening and one from the beginning. We just need to make sure that the smoke that comes out of it doesn't go beyond this line. This line you see, it doesn't go beyond this line in this particular area. Because we don't want the smoke to come out of this place, right. It just cannot come out. It can come out only from this opening. So, now let's turn the smoke on. And we need

to create a video timeline. So for that, let's go to Window and then let's choose timeline from right here. Now click on Create Video Timeline. Now, you will see this vapour and we can actually stick the timeline at the bottom. Just drag it and drop it at the bottom. And let's play the timeline. Let's drag it down. We just need to make sure that the smoke does not exceed this line. Press Ctrl or Command + T and let's move the smoke a little bit up. It should begin from right there. All right. No

w, let's zoom in and let's check. Scroll through the timeline. And for smoother movement, you can always choose the quality. So in this gear box right there, click on the gear icon, you can choose the resolution to be 25%, 50% or 100%. This is just for preview. The higher the number, the higher the quality while preview, and the slower the performance. So depending upon the speed of your computer, you can choose the proper one. Let's see how it performs at 100% and for me, 100 seems fine. For my

computer, it works. So we need to make sure that it does not exceed this point. So, we need to control the size. Press Ctrl or Command + T and we can place the anchor point right at the bottom and then hold the Alt key or the Option key and make it smaller. All right. At this point, you can see that it's not exceeding this point right there, this intersection right there. Let's play from the very beginning. Hit Enter or Return. It should not exceed. See it's exceeding just a little bit. So we w

ill press Ctrl or Command + T again and make it even smaller. Alright, that seems about right. Hit Enter or Return. Let's check. All right, up until this point, it's perfect. From this point, it begins to just exceed, and we don't need that long of a video. So, I'm going to leave it at that. And at this point, we can actually use this slider to just zoom out of the timeline and just drag it to this point. Let's just zoom in. And there you go. That's how long we want our video to be. Let's play i

t from the beginning. So this is how it is going to be. Now, we need to remove the black. So which is the Blend Mode which takes away the dark and only brightens stuff? Screen, right? So change the Blend Mode from Normal to Screen. There you go. This looks beautiful. However, we still need to mask certain areas. We don't want the smoke to come out of this place and also some other areas like this. So we will click on the Mask button right in there and then take the Brush. You can take a Soft Rou

nd Brush, or you can take all the time in the world to create a selection and all of that. But I'm just going to take a Soft Round Brush. Click on that. Let's make the brush a little smaller and paint with black around these areas where the smoke should not come out from. So, we're just masking away these certain areas. Also, just to be able to see what you are masking, you can change the Blend Mode back to Normal and just decrease the Opacity and come back to the Mask right there and just take

certain areas away. Also, we want to mask a little bit softly from the top because this leads to an abrupt end. If you just change it to Screen Blend Mode very slightly, it leads to an abrupt end at the bottom. So for that, let's change it back to Normal, just to show you what's happening here. We can take a Soft Round Brush and just simply.. just a soft wipe. All right. Now, let's change the Blend Mode from Normal to Screen. Now, this looks nice. Let's play the video. Let's see how that looks.

So, see how nice this is. However, there is one problem with this. This is not continuous. As it reaches the end, the beginning is abrupt. So I'm going to make it reach the end. See, the beginning is abrupt. We don't want that to happen. So, first of all, click on the gear icon right there and make sure Loop Playback is checked so that it's going to play continuously in a loop. There are crows in the background. Please forgive them for the noise. The next thing we need to do is we need to make s

ure that the starting point is the same as the ending point so that when it reaches the end, it reaches the starting point again, so that it looks like the smoke is continuous forever. And for that, we need to choose an inner starting point. We cannot start it from the very beginning. So, let's say this is from where we start, okay. So we will just drag it to that point. So, now that red line is reached. Now, we will take the video all the way to the left from the starting point, from the actual

starting point. So, now we simply need to make a copy of this clip right there. So all you need to do is to drag the layer and drop it into the New Layer icon right there. We simply have a copy of the same proportion. If it's not, you can always adjust the proportion or copy that again. The one on the above, we can name this Start and the one at the bottom, we can name this End. And, all right, we want the starting point to be the same. So we will take the end and take it to the end. Okay, now

the starting points are the same as it ends. So, as the starting point of this one ends, the starting point of this and this are the same. So, as we reach the end of the start, we start with the starting point of the start. Making sense? So now, how do we merge both of them? Let's extend the end from the left hand side, just like that. And then also end the end towards the end, just like this. Okay. Now it's ending at the right time. Now let's zoom in and check whether they're at the exact same

spot. Yes, they are at the exact same spot. Let's make it larger so that we can understand what's happening. So at this point, we want the Opacity of the start clip to drop and the Opacity of the end clip to rise. Okay, so, let's just click on this arrow of the start and click on this timer icon of this Opacity. Right now, it is at 66. So let's just go ahead and increase it. Now at the end, as we reach towards the end, just before it, we can click on the button again, and here we will set the Op

acity to zero. So it goes from 100, slowly, it goes down to zero. The opposite will happen with the bottom or the end clip. So click on this arrow right there, and we will reach the exact same point which was this point right there. And here, we will click on the timer of the Opacity. We will set it to zero. And as we reach towards the end right in here, we will create one more point by clicking on this button, and then increase it to 100. Now, let's play all of this. Now, click on this arrow ag

ain, to just kind of make it cleaner. And now let's play it. Now, as you can see, this is brilliantly continuous and it will go on and on forever, for eternity. Okay, now let's just go ahead and export it. It's also pretty simple. Now if you want to add some blur effects to the smoke, you can do all of that but that's going to take a little more render time. So, for this, let's go to File and Export - Save for Web. All you need to make sure in this area.. By the way, it's going to take a little

while. See it's loading right there. So let's give it some time. So the video is ready. You can also see the preview by clicking on the Play button right there. Okay, so it's playing, and it's going to play continuously for eternity. Just make sure.. let's stop it. Just make sure that Looping Options - Forever is checked, so that it loops forever. Now we need to make sure that it's GIF. And I'm keeping all of the other settings as it is, and let's click on Save. So, I'm saving in this folder - G

IF PiXimperfect - Example Cinemagraph PiXimperfect. Let's save it and it should be there. So let's go to our Finder and find that. So here we are in our Finder and there it is.. Example Cinemagraph PiXimperfect. Let's play it and it will go on for eternity. You can make it shorter, longer. I just showed you how to do it. The creativity is all yours. You are the artists. So that's how to create an animated GIF that goes on for eternity in Photoshop. All you need to do is making sure that the begi

nning is same as the end. That's it. I hope this video helped you and if it did, make sure to give us a like and also don't forget to subscribe and not just subscribe, ring the bell so that you, my friend, don't miss any other future tips, tricks or tutorials. I would like to take this moment to thank all these nice and amazing people for supporting this channel on Patreon and helping keep PiXimperfect free for everybody forever. Thanks so much for all your support. Thank you for watching. I wil

l see you guys again in my next one. Till then, stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating. This transcript was generated by https://otter.ai