Matcha Gracias

This is my last post of this year, so I wanted to make it count. In this post I will show you guys how to make a simple stop-motion animation with just using a single image.

Let’s get started!

First thing first you open up the photoshop on your desktop or on your dock. Go to File – Open – Select the file from the source (USB, hard drive, desktop). After locating double click on the file and it will open right away on photoshop unless it is a raw file. For this tutorial I would recommend to use compressed image formats like JPEG, PNG or TIFF.

Now let’s edit the image little bit before we get onto animation part. For this particular image,  I am going to use clone stamp to get rid of little lights in the corner so image can look clean. In order to use clone stamp, first hold option and choose an area that you want to clone then start applying by releasing the option key and clicking on the areas that you want to fix.

Now it’s time to create the color layers. For this particular image, I am going to use Hue & Saturation layer. This essentially changes the colors in the image without actually destroying the original file. It is super helpful especially if you want to change only certain colors in the image. Let’s say you have a green scarf and it doesn’t match with your background, with Hue & Saturation you can make that any color you want.

From here, you will see a mask thats created for you. White stands for the original image and black stands for the mask (adjustment) that you are going to make. Since this is a very simple image and there are not too many colors, I am not actually going to make any changes to the mask. Instead I am just going to play around with the hue to see which color I like for my feed. For this, make sure to not to play around too much with the saturation and lightness because that could make the image look very fake. Avoid increasing them and best is to just leave at 0 or decrease  just a tiny bit.

Now that I have selected my colors, its time to animate them. You go to window, timeline and once the timeline opens click create!

You will see something similar like this below. You are actually pretty much done with your animation. All you need to now is just move these layers accordingly so it could look like an animation!

I move them generally by frames, but its totally up to you depending on the speed that you want this animation to have. Just remember that if you want to post this on instagram, it has to be at least 3 seconds. So what I do sometimes is, I make very short version here because I like fast pace then put on iMovie or Quicktime Player to make it longer. However, if you don’t want to deal with another software, just duplicate these layers and paste them over and over until you reach to the length that you want.

Tadahhh! its time to export. You have two options depending on where you going to publish this. If you are publishing on web or like Tumblr, you can export as a GIF.

In order to do export as a GIF go to export – save for web – save! Make sure to click forever in the looping option below because if you don’t animation will only play once. Now go ahead and share away! If you want to share on instagram, read the rest of the instructions below.

For instagram, you need to export as a video file since they don’t accept GIF. In order to do that go to export – Render Video – Select the destination and click Render. It might take a while depending on the size of the file.

Here is the finished product. Hope you guys liked it and learned something from it. Muchas gracias!

Happy new year!