How to Easily Create a Cinemagraph in Photoshop and Premiere Pro

Learn to How to Easily Create a Cinemagraph in Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Learn step by step to create a cinemagraph. Use either Photoshop or Premiere Pro. Easy to follow steps.

How to Create a Cinemagraph In Photoshop

Hello, everyone. In today’s video, I’ll show you how to easily create a cinema graph in Photoshop and Premiere Pro. So how do they work? Cinema graph is two things. You take a video of a moving subject. Then you take a photo or screengrab of the movie subject.

And you laid on top of that video. So now we just have a flat image. Then we cut out a hole in that image for the area that we still want to see moving. So one area of the cinema graph is moving while the rest of it is completely frozen.

Second, it’s a never ending loop. So the video part of this cinema graph actually loops into itself. So to shoot your cinema graph, you’re going to want to shoot with a tripod. And if you’re going to shoot for Instagram, you might want to shoot in the vertical mode here.

So very important to have a stable camera. You don’t have a tripod. Something to keep it steady. And of course, if you do shoot horizontally, you could still crop. But chances are it is going to come out better if you shoot vertically or you’re shooting intentionally.

say for Instagram. If you’re not going to shoot for Instagram, go ahead and shoot horizontally and crop accordingly. We’re going to start off in Photoshop. If you have some other photo editing software and you don’t have Premiere Pro, which you might want to do is edit that video as far as colors and brightness before you bring it in

to Photoshop. If you can’t, you can still do it in Photoshop. You can use adjustment layers in Photoshop or video, just like you can for photo editing. So I open my video in Photoshop. It created a layer here on the Layers panel.

And also, notice you have a timeline down here. As soon as you open up a video here in Photoshop, you should see that timeline. If you don’t, you come up here to a window where it says timeline. You can check that.

So down here on this timeline, you can scrub through a video like you can on other video editing programs. And if you come over here to this gear, you have a resolution. Mine is at 25 percent. You can go up to 50 or 100 percent.

What this resolution is for is it will help in your playback. Say, if you have a computer that’s not fast or you have a big file. If you could drop the resolution, then you can have your playback run a little bit smoother.

You want to make sure that loop playback is checked while we’re working on this. This is also a good time to crop your video. So let’s say I want to shoot this for Instagram, say, on the Instagram feed.

Even though I didn’t shoot this vertical. But if I come up here and do a crop and if I put this 1080 x1350 up here at the top, this will set up my crop for the Instagram feed.

So all I need to do is click my checkmark and there it is. So in this case, the crop worked out full video in there that I want to work with. Now we need to find an endpoint in outpoint in our video clip.

And you can scrub through with the play head or you can press spacebar to play. But I want to find a place where the coffee is going into the cup and a stream of coffee is constant with not much movement.

Also not much movement of my hand. And so I’m going to try and scrub to that spot, a similar starting right there. And I’m going to come over here to the left hand side, to the beginning of the clip and see how the cursor turned to a left and right black arrow.

And I’m going to drag all the way over to where the play head is. This will be my endpoint. And I’m going to let that play a little bit. And I think right there will be my endpoint.

So I’ll come to the right hand side of the clip. There is my arrows and I’m going to drag the clip over to my play head down here at the bottom. You can zoom in more. Just drag this little arrow here.

And I made my clip a little bit bigger. So we have our endpoint in our outpoint. So now we need to make the first frame, the clip be the same as the last frame of the clip. This will help to make a seamless and smooth infinite loop.

So to do this, we need to duplicate this clip. So I’m come over here to the Layers panel, click on this video group here and hit command + J. And so now to make the first frame the same as the last frame, we take this Bottum clip and drag it all the way over to where it meets.

The end of the first clip is right here at the start of the bottom clip. And you can use this arrow down here to zoom in to get it more precise. Now, to help create that perfect loop, we’re going to take the bottom layer here and extend it over here a little bit more.

Something like that, you know, would come down here to this bottom layer, grab the end of it and make it the same length here as the top layer. Now we want to make the top layer fade out, which will reveal the bottom layer below.

To do that, we’re going to use key frames. I’m going to start with the top layer selected and come over here towards this video group one and hit this arrow. And here is opacity, I need to move my play head to where th

layer below starts and a click on the opacity stopwatch right here and there is our first keyframe. I’m going to slide to play it over just a little bit, you and I’m going to hit this diamond right here next to opacity, and it’s going to add another keyframe.

Then I’m going to come over here to the Layers panel. And with this layer selected right here on the top, I’m going to bring my opacity down to zero. And last thing I want to do with these key frames is I’m going to move this key frame all the way over to the end.

So what we’ve done here is as the video plays and it gets to this first key frame right here, the capacity of the layer above is at 100 as it keeps on moving through. The opacity goes down, down, down until it comes to the end and the opacity is zero.

And it is revealing the layer below. So this is where we’re creating our infinite loop. So now if I press the spacebar to hit play, you can see that there’s some movement. And, of course, some lagging here because I don’t have a fast computer.

We’re going to do something to stop all that movement. So we’re going to take a snapshot of all the layers below, and we’re going to do that with a stamp visible layer. So if I had shift option command E, there is my step invisible layer above all my other video layers, if I hit space bar again.

You don’t see any movement, I’m,going to make the stamp visible there the same length as all my other layers. Now we have to punch a hole in this stamp visible layer so that we can see the moving coffee coming into the cup.

And we’re going to do that with a layer mask. So I’m going to come down here two layers, panel, and hit the new layer mask icon and select that layer mask over here on the left. I’m going to make sure that my foreground color is black.

Hit B with a brush tool, because we’re going to paint black on our white layer mask to reveal our areas that we want moving, which is the stream of coffee coming out of the coffee pot. And you can zoom in a little bit and just paint.

And if you hit the backslash key right below the delete key, you can actually see where you were painting. And you can use your left and right brackets on your keyboard to make your brush bigger or smaller. Of course, if you make a mistake and hit the X key, which turns your swatch, color your foreground color to

white and you can paint away in the areas that you got too much. But here X again, and it is painting with black and revealing your liquid coming out of the coffee pot. And if I hit backslash again, that goes away.

And if I hit my spacebar. You could see why I still need to paint further into the cup and make all my modifications here. And I’ll keep on painting until I see that I’ve included the whole path of the coffee coming into the cup.

And If I hit spacebar again. And there we have our cinema graph. Not too bad. Let me zoom out a little bit so you can see that. Don’t worry. Once you go over these steps a few times, you’ll be able to do this easily and make your own cinema graphs

Now, the last thing we’re going to do is export it. But before we export it, there’s some tips I have for you. So if you didn’t have a chance to color grade or make any kind of adjustments to this clip before you brought it into Photoshop, you could still come down here to the Layers panel and see

, for instance, at a hue and saturation adjustment layer. Bring up the saturation of the clip. You can also crop your clip right here if you didn’t get chance do when you first opened it up. Something to keep in mind for Instagram.

If it’s a video, it has a minimum of three seconds. So a lot of times you make a cinema graphic and it’s only a couple of seconds. You may need to bring this into a another video editing program and duplicate the clip to make it go over three seconds or however long you want to make it.

And the last thing is this clip has some audio in it, and it’s the liquid poring into the cup. You may not want the audio in your video, in fact, for a cinema graph. It’s probably going to be better if you don’t have audio unless it’s synched perfectly.

But here in the timeline panel here, there’s an icon right here. And once I click that, that’s no longer selected and I hit the spacebar. And the audio is gone. So you might want to mute the audio before you export it.

So now let’s export our video two ways from Photoshop that we’re going to export this. And I’ll show you quickly. So I come up here to file export. Render video. And we’re going to name our file. And I put this to what it is, crop to 10 80 by 1350.

I’m gong to make the frame rate the same. And all you need to say is render. And that will put your video on your hard drive. And what you want to use the video for is say if you’re posting this to Instagram, you would make a video out of it and post it that way.

Next, we’re going to create a GIF and that you can use for websites or any other platform that accepts gifs and runs them. And here’s the video playing here. It’s four seconds. And now if I want to make a gif I come up here to file export, save for Web legacy, you know, you can do is come up

here at the top, make sure it get GIF is selected in your image, size is what you want. And looping options, make sure says forever. And all you have to do is save it. And if I come to where it is saved on my desktop, select it and just hit spacebar and there’s my gif.

How to Create a Cinemagraph In Premiere Pro

Let’s do this. And Premiere Pro. So I’m going to start off with this video clip. And it is a 4K clip. And I know I want to post this on Instagram feed.

So I created a custom sequence. So I come up here to file new sequence and I’m going to come down here to my custom sequence. And it is in Instagram full screen, 1080 by 1350. And I’m going to say, OK, and I’m gong to take my clip and drop it on a timeline.

And I say keep existing settings. And I can see I need to scale it down and come up to my effects controls. And come to scale. And just bring this down so that it fits. Another thing I want to do is remove the audio, because I don’t want no audio in my cinema graph I’m going to right, click on

my audio and say unlink and select my audio again and delete it. So now I want to duplicate my clip, hold down alt and drag up in. My clip is duplicated. We need to look for an endpoint and an outpoint.

I’m looking for an endpoint where my video is looking steady. I’m focusing on my stream of coffee coming out of the coffee pot and just trying to look through here, scrub through and see where that might be. I think I might want to start it right there and then take both my clips in.

I am going to trim them to the play head and I’m going to bring them both over to the start of the timeline. I want to look for the point where I stopped pouring my coffee some where around here looks pretty steady, make my timeline a little bigger here so we can see.

And now I’m going to drag my top track all the way over to where the play here is right there. So the reason I just did that was because I want a loop. And a loop is actually going to start at the beginning of the timeline and it’s going to end right here where that clip got moved

over to. Now, I want to cut my video here on the lower track and hit C and then it cut it right there, and I’m going to delete the rest of it behind that. So now I’m going to take this top layer here and I’m going to drag it back a little bit, something like that.

You see, if I play it, we still have a little bit of movement we’ve got to get rid of, but starting to see our loop get started here. So now we need to apply an effect. So in effect, panel, come over here to video transitions, dissolve and cross, dissolve, or you can just search for cross dissolve, up here

in the search box. I’m going to drag a cross dissolve onto my top track. I am going to adjust it so that it is a little bit shorter on that top track. And I see that a little bit better.

It’s a little bit shorter. And so now it’s just going to fade into the other video. You can see that fade right there. It’s not too noticeable, but you can see the fade. So now we’re starting to get a loopable video.

So now this is where our loop is going to end. So in hit C. And I’m going to cut off the rest of the clip there and delete it and play it back. And you can see a little bit of a dissolve there.

So now we’re going to take our there down here. The bottom layer now we’re going to duplicate this layer hit ALT and drag this up. And we’re going to scrub through here and see how we’re looking. And we’re going to drag it to a point where we like it.

And with that top layer selected, going to right click and go towards his frame, hold options. And we’re going to change this to play head and say, OK, so now if we play this back, we have a still frame.

Nothing is moving. So we need to mask out that area of the coffee. You go up here to your effects controls and we’re says opacity. Click on the pen tool and you can mask out here. And you can move your mask if you need to.

Also, you can come over here to your mask, feathering and increase this a little bit and make it 20. Make sure you click inverted. And now when I play back the clip, I have my cinemagraph Now we need to export our clip, mark my in and out points and hit command + M.

I’m going to rename this and save it. All I have to do is match source, high bit rate. I’m not going to be exporting audio, so I don’t need to check it. I know my width and height is 1080×1350.

And keep the frame rate the same and I can just export it. So this is video and I can see that it is four seconds and I can post this directly to the Instagram feed as it is. I know that it’ll play well on the Instagram feed because the video requirements is three to sixty seconds.

And if you need to make a gif, just hit, command + M and come up here to the format and select animated gif. Everything’s the same here. This preset anime to give match source. And you can rename this something else and you don’t need to change anything else.

Just export it to video playing. And for a gif just selected on Mac Spacebar. And there’s our gif. If you want to know more about Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, click or tap on one of the videos on the screen.

Now, if you haven’t already, subscribe like and share this video. And remember, it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.

Read the previous blog article here ▶️ How to Add Captions in Premiere Pro 2021 – New Speech to Text Auto Transcription

See my photography website here ▶️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com