How to Create a Cool Animated Mist Effect in Photoshop CS5

Lloyd — Mon, 23 May 2011 17:57:00 +0000

Animated Gifs

I love these animated gifs and wanted to try something like that myself. I did a photoshoot a couple of months ago and used a fog machine to create a misty background. It would be cool to show the mist swirling around in a short animated gif. The original photo had some mist, but I wanted to add some more in Photoshop and then animate it.

Original:

Original Photo

Animated:

Fog Animation Effect

Photoshop CS5

Level of difficulty: Intermediate. You should be familiar with working with layers, resizing images and using the warp tool.

Create the mist layers:

(Click on the screen shots to zoom)

Create a blank layer above the edited/retouched photo
Paint some mist on the blank layer & name the layer Mist 1. I used these mist brushes by SpiritSighs.

Mist Brushes

Copy the layer, name it Mist 2 and warp it using Edit => Transform => Warp. You can warp the mist to make it look like it has drifted around.
Copy the warped layer and repeat with another warp (Mist 3).
Copy the above layer and warp it again (Mist 4). You will now have the original image plus four mist layers above it. Click on Fig. 1 to expand.

Fig. 1 Layer palette with mist layers

Create the Animation Frames:

Select the 5 layers and open the animation window (Window => animation - Fig. 2). Make sure you are in frame view (Fig. 3).

Fig. 2 Opening the Animation Window

Fig. 3 Animation window in frame view

Click on the frame and duplicate it by dragging it to the new frame icon. Repeat this four times to give a total of 5 frames (Fig. 4 & 5).

Fig. 4 Duplicating the frame

Fig. 5 Duplicating the frame

Click on the first frame. Go to the layers panel and make only the base layer (retouch) visible (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6 Click on the eye to hide, click again to reveal layer

Click on the second frame and make the retouch layer on the Mist 1 layer visible using the layers panel
Click on the third frame and make the base layer & the Mist 2 layer visible.
Click on the fourth frame and make the base layer & the Mist 3 layer visible
Click on the fifth frame & make the base layer & the Mist 4 layer visible
Select all 5 frames by clicking on the first and Shift-Clicking on the last one.
Change the frame delay time to 0.1 (Fig. 7) You can try different timings depending on what works best for your project.

Fig. 7 Change frame delay

Tween the animation to make it run more smoothly

Click on the first frame and Shift-click on the second frame
Go to the animation menu and choose Tween... (Fig. 8)

Fig. 8 Animation Menu

Enter 10 in the "frames to add box" and select all layers, and position & opacity (Fig. 9)

Fig. 9 Tween Dialog Box

Select frames 12 & 13 and repeat the Tween for these two frames. Repeat this for frames 23 & 24 and 34 & 35 (See Fig. 10)

Fig. 10 Tweening Frames

Duplicate the last frame (45) and move it to the front
Tween the first and second frames as before. This makes the animation smoothly cycle back to the beginning.
Make sure the repeat mode is "Forever"
Save everything!

Check it out - when you press the play button you will have a pretty smooth animation!

Save the animated gif

Resize the image to the size that you want (I used a height of 375 pixels because it gave me a file size under 2 MB). Go to Image => Image Size and select the size that you want, making sure to lock the aspect ratio.
Go to File => Save for Web & Devices.
Set to "forever"
Select Gif and Save (Fig. 11)

Fig. 11 Saving the GIF

To view the animated gif, open it with your browser.

I'm looking forward to doing some more of these animations and have lots of ideas for future shoots! If you have tried it, please share by posting a link in the comments section.

5 Free Tutorials on Split Toning Using Lightroom

Lloyd — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 19:02:47 +0000

Photographers have always pushed the limits, trying to go beyond simply capturing a realistic image of the scene or portrait. The goal is to express emotion and creativity and to impact the viewer on a deeper level. In the days of film photography, split toning was a darkroom technique for giving different colours and tones to an image by using a variety of papers and chemicals during processing. With Lightroom, photographers can use the Split Toning panel in the Develop Module to reproduce the darkroom effects, and to go beyond them, creating new colour effects that would have been much more difficult to do in the darkroom.

For example, I used split toning in this image to add blue tones to the shadow areas. I like the way the blue interacted with the darker tones on the background, the eye makeup and the model's hair. I did the split toning on the camera raw image https://www.glenerinpharmacy.com/buy-generic-cialis-online/ using Lightroom 3.2, then finished the retouching in Photoshop.

Before: original raw image

After: split toned and retouched

Split toning is very simple to do in Lightroom. Once you have created a split tone effect that you like, you can save it as a preset and use it quickly on other photos. You can also download presets for all sorts of split tone effects. Here are five free tutorials about using Lightroom for split toning.

1. Split Toning Color Images in Adobe Lightroom

Split Toning Color Images in Adobe Lightroom from Jared Platt on Vimeo.

2.Using the split toning panel to change colours in a photo

RAW Processing Concentrate - Split Toning - Lightroom Tutorial from Rob & Lauren on Vimeo.

3 . Split toning for a tinting effect in Lightroom - Step by step tutorial for split toning black and white images.

4. A demo showing how to improve a photo using split toning

5. Using the split toning panel in Lightroom