Exercising my Photoshop skills by creating a Cinemagraph and a Composite!
Nearly every photographer can agree, the art is in the post production. Sometimes creating your art is by simply upping the exposure or changing a few hues. Other times, you have to watch a ton of YouTube tutorials, have a ton of layers, bracketing, filters, warping, etc. This type of editing can take hours, even days. It’s exhausting but worth it. You not only get a beautiful image, you learn your way around photoshop pretty well!
Because I’m always digging for new tips and tricks, I tried to make two creative images: a composite and a cinemagraph.
A composite is an image made up of multiple images. For example, you could find a picture of a giraffe and a picture of a birthday party, combine them, and make it look like the giraffe is at a birthday party! Now I’m wishing I did that as my composite. . .
A cinemagraph is very similar to a gif, but there is a key difference. In a gif, everything is moving. In a cinemagraph, everything is still -like a picture- and one key aspect is moving. For example, you take a picture of a man next to a waterfall and a video of the waterfall. You compile the two and it makes a cinemagraph.
Creating the composite
To make this exercise a little more challenging, I decided to only use photos that I’ve recently shot. I can’t use any images from UnSplash, Pixabay, nothing. Thankfully I had a great photoshoot a few days ago that I was excited to try a composite on.
During my photoshoot, I took a bunch of photos of a cute little bird. It was sadly stuck inside an abandoned school and was trying to fly out of a closed window. The poor thing! I quickly took a few photos and opened the window and it flew off. The photos I got were pretty good and I was excited to use them in a composite. I used these photos as my key inspiration and image.
I wanted to find an image that would look good with the birds and seem like the images are interacting with each other. Thankfully, I took the perfect image for this. It was of a cowboy holding out his hat.
I immediately knew I wanted to have multiple images of the bird perched on the hat looking at him. Using the object select tool, I selected the birds and added it to the cowboy’s hat. I rotated them and used the free transform tool to scale them as well. However, after doing all of that, the birds looked obviously out of place. So, I selected my layers, went to Edit and clicked Auto-Blend Layers. It added light and color to the birds and shadows on the hat. This made it look a lot more realistic!
Creating the Cinemagraph
I’ve never made a cinemagraph before. Yet for some reason, I decided to do an incredibly difficult type of cinemagraph: a double exposure cinemagraph. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this with out the help of YouTube and Jobi, the creator of dR-DesignResources. Thank you!
I started with an image of my cowboy, the same one I used for my composite. After selecting him, I created a new document. I then grabbed a video I took while at the photoshoot and made it a layer. Then, I made the video layer a mask and painted the video wherever I wanted it to be visible. The video was too fast so I had to slow that down quite a bit.
Then, ta-da! I finished it! Just I clicked save, Photoshop had an error with saving it and crashed. So I had to start all over. But it’s all good! I’m happy with how it turned out!
After finishing those two, I was pretty tired. But my mind is already stirring with ideas of what I can do next. So, who knows, you might just see a few more composites and cinemagraphs from me soon!
I really like the composite that you made in this post with the man and the birds on his hat, that is super cool. You should check out the composite photograph I made at https://nicholasledbetter.com/scanography-and-composition/. You also did a really cool cinemagraph. Have you seen the cinemagraph that Juleen made? Check it out at https://juleenmathias.com/scanner-art-and-cinemagraphs/. There’s also a really cool composite photography tutorial you can check out at https://www.photillustrator.com/what-is-composite-photography/#:~:text=Composite%20Photography%20is%20simply%20the,to%20complete%20a%20final%20piece.
Your cinemagraph makes me think of an old western movie. Amazing subject and creative idea!
I created a cinemagraph too. You should check it out!
Have you seen Jasmine’s post on creative scan art? It’s a great read!
Here’s a great tutorialon how to make a perfect cinemagraph.
Kaylee, Your creative composite is my favorite! I love that you got so creative with another image that you had. Had you already taken an image of the birds before as well or did you go get those to put into the photo? It is such a fun idea especially since his hat was tipped so well. Here is a link to my post on scanography.https://kylabingham.com/creative-choice/ I also really liked Laurens Creative Composite of images https://laphotoanddesign.com/creative-works-using-scanography-and-creative-composite/
Here are some more amazing example of scanography: https://www.pinterest.com/klhoey/scanography/
This is a great composite, Kaylee! I love to see other’s work. I also did some creative work this last week, and you can check out my comic book scan art I did at https://westleymata.com/comic-book-scan-art/
If you want to see someone else’s composites, I would recommend Kyla’s at https://kylabingham.com/creative-choice/
I also found this helpful article with steps on how to make a killer composites https://www.slrlounge.com/adobe-photoshop-composite/
Hey Kaylee! You did a really great job on your cinemagraph. I thought its was very creative!
Here is a link to my blog with my cinemagraph if you want to check it out: https://lydiaannphotography.com/portrait-with-sunflower/
You should take a look at Nicks blog as well because his work is pretty cool: https://nicholasledbetter.com/scanography-and-composition/
Here are some more creative type cinemagraphs to do: https://www.sandynoto.com/blog/9-creative-cinemagraph-ideas-for-beginners