Animating Still Photos: Quickstart

Introduction to Perspective & Parallax

Lets take a minute and quickly go over perspective and the basics behind animating still photography

Separating your foreground object

This lesson starts you off on the easiest of techniques to help you get the movement on still photographs made famous by Ken Burns. Isolating and correcting elements of a photo for animation in Photoshop. 

Creating Basic Motion

Importing & animating the elements of a photograph in After Effects as well as exporting it.

Separating your Foreground Object

Masking and isolation of the foreground element in Photoshop & getting in-depth with the photoshop workflow.

Preparing your Background

Creating a version of the background image that alows for motion and parallax.

Extracting Foreground Elements

Extracting even more elements from the foreground for additional animation and depth perspective.

Creating the "Ken Burns" Effect

Importing beginning the animation process in After Effects and setting the project up.

Motion Techniques

Here we are going to get into advanced motion with more depth and adjusting our anchor points to match motion with other elements as well as creating masks and animating additional elements all in After Effects.

Adding Moving Sun Rays

Lets add additional effects and animate them in After Effects so as to increase the effect of motion on our image.

Adding Final Details and Exporting

Now lets finalize our project and add a tiny bit more depth to the overall image and export it for use.

Cutting our Your Main Character

First we begin with cutting out in Photoshop our main focus, the character, the foreground.

Clone Stamping Techniques - Part 1

Now that we have our main subject isolated, we are going to clean up our background layer so as to remove the character completely and have an animatable and movable background layer.

Clone Stamping Techniques - Part 2

Here we continue where we left off in the last lesson and get into additional clonestamp techniques so you get a great result fast taking into account perspective and what we will see in the final product.

Duplicating Elements

Isolating additional elements for parallax and duplicating pieces elements we do have so we can correct what we are missing.

Extracting Perspective Elements - Part 1

Now we are goign to extract even more foreground elemnts to really enchance the 3d motion expiereince.

Extracting Perspective Elements - Part 2

Continuing from last lesson and extracting even more elements in the foreground and background.

Creating Parallax - Part 1

Here we create our After Effects project, import our elements for animation and set up our perspective in our project.

Creating Parallax - Part 2

Adding our final foreground elements in After Effects and finalizing the animation.