From the course: Creating Cinemagraphs and Plotagraphs

Looping strategies with Photoshop

From the course: Creating Cinemagraphs and Plotagraphs

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Looping strategies with Photoshop

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- In order for the cinemagraph to be effective, we need to see a loop. We're going to want it to seamlessly blend so there's not a jump in the middle. This can be done with a simple piece of advice. If you can't solve it, dissolve it. We'll come here into the timeline and press Play. You're going to notice that when it gets to the end, and we start again, there's a jump. Well, let's fix that. First, I'm going to choose to Loop Playback. With the video layer selected, I'll split it. Now, if we look at this, what you'll notice is that from here to here is a clean loop. Let's simply put these in a different order. I'll grab the first piece, move it to the front. And grab this piece and put it at the end. Now, the last frame and the first frame are fine, but of course there's a jump in the middle. But that's okay. We can simply take our cross dissolve and I'll apply a cross fade. And you see that the clip shortens. If you lengthen that dissolve, the clips will continue to adjust. Here we go. Let's pull this in a little bit, and watch it play back. Now, we have a slow, gentle dissolve in the middle and the clouds just keep floating through and fading into place. Yes, there's a loop point, but it's simple and non-abrupt, and that creates a very gentle motion for the cinemagraph. Let's try that again. We'll go to the falls and select the bottom layer. Click on it and add and edit. Let's pull up so there's a little more room. Now we'll simply swap these. You see the two clips change places. If we look at the last frame here, it's good. It smoothly goes into the next. But in the middle there'll be a small jump. You saw it right there. This can be fixed by simply overlapping the two layers. Let's do that by adding a cross fade, and now adjusting the duration. You see that it simply creates a smooth blend in the middle. I'll adjust the handles here, and click the play button. Let's adjust and see the whole frame. There we go. There it is, nice and smooth. The dissolve in the middle perfectly hides the edit point in the cinemagraph.

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