Clouds Animation

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hey, everyone.
• 00:05 When people hear the word Photoshop, most immediately associate it
• 00:08 with image editing and 98% of the time they'd be correct.
• 00:12 However, there are a few features that Adobe included in Photoshop to
• 00:15 appeal to a much wider range of customers, such as video editing.
• 00:19 In this video, we're gonna take a look at how we can create a time-lapse style
• 00:22 effect using a still image and stock video.
• 00:26 I have to note before I go on,
• 00:27 not all versions of Photo Shop will have the video editing capabilities.
• 00:31 If you're running the extended version of Photoshop,
• 00:33 you'll be able to follow along with no issue.
• 00:36 The standard version however, doesn't have the same functionality.
• 00:39 Importing video footage into Photoshop works just like it does for images.
• 00:42 You can either open them through the File menu or
• 00:45 simply drag them right into Photoshop.
• 00:47 Let's focus on the image before we touch the video.
• 00:50 In this image, we're going to be replacing the current sky with the clouds footage,
• 00:54 so we need to isolate the sky from the rest of the image.
• 00:57 This can be done in a variety of ways, but because the sky is fairly uniform,
• 01:01 I'm gonna grab my magic wand tool and with tolerance set to 15.
• 01:05 Start clicking in the areas that you want selected.
• 01:07 Once you make your first selection,
• 01:09 make sure to hold down your Shift key to include the other areas that you click.
• 01:12 Make sure that you include all traces of sky which may be hiding in
• 01:15 between fences and such.
• 01:17 Any little bit that may be left behind will throw off the whole effect.
• 01:20 Good. Now that the selection is complete,
• 01:22 we need to separate it from the rest of the image.
• 01:24 This can be done by copying the selection onto a new layer.
• 01:27 Head up to the Layer menu, down to New and then over to Layer via Copy.
• 01:31 Or you can use the shortcut key, Cmd or Ctrl+J.
• 01:35 Perfect. It's time to bring in our video.
• 01:37 Hopping over to the tab that contains our video file, we can simply drag the layer
• 01:41 containing our video right over to our document which contains our image.
• 01:45 Once it's there, place the video so that it covers the whole entire sky.
• 01:49 Once it's in place, in your Layers Panel, right-click on the Video Layer and
• 01:52 create a Clipping Mask.
• 01:54 This will place the video of the clouds inside the sky which we
• 01:57 extracted a few moments ago.
• 01:59 Good. So now, how do we play this thing?
• 02:01 We need to bring up our Animation panel.
• 02:03 This can be done by heading up to Window and then down to Animation.
• 02:07 When the Animation panel appears,
• 02:08 let's go over a few things which can help in your editing.
• 02:11 First, the most obvious is the Play button, which can
• 02:14 also be triggered by tapping your space bar, this will playback your video.
• 02:17 Now you might have just noticed that our clouds have disappeared,
• 02:21 this is because the video file is five seconds long but
• 02:24 the duration of the document is at the ten seconds.
• 02:26 To correct this, click on the drop-down menu at the top-right corner of your
• 02:30 Animation panel, choose Document Settings and change the Duration accordingly.
• 02:34 I'm gonna drop it down to five seconds.
• 02:36 The next thing that we're going to look at is how we
• 02:38 can fade our video layer in or out.
• 02:41 Beside the video layer in our Animation panel,
• 02:43 click on the arrow to expand it's contents.
• 02:45 We want to adjust the Opacity.
• 02:48 Clicking on the clock icon will add our first key frame to
• 02:51 help us adjust our Opacity.
• 02:53 When the key frame is added, set the Opacity of the video layer to how you
• 02:57 want it to appear when the video starts.
• 02:59 In this case, I'm gonna start the video with the sky in its clear state.
• 03:02 So I'm gonna set the opacity at zero percent.
• 03:05 Now, move your playhead to the point where you want the clouds to be 100% visible.
• 03:10 I'm gonna set it around three seconds.
• 03:12 Now beside the clock there is an upwards arrow, might be a little bit difficult to
• 03:15 see, this will add an additional key frame where your play head is.
• 03:19 When the new key frame is added, set the Opacity back up to 100%.
• 03:22 Playing back our video, we can now see the clouds gradually fade into view.
• 03:27 It may be a little bit choppy the first time we play it as Photoshop is
• 03:30 rendering the video.
• 03:32 This also works with adjustment layers.
• 03:34 Obviously, if the sky is getting dark and
• 03:36 gloomy, we need to adjust our image as well.
• 03:38 In your Layers panel, select your Background image and
• 03:41 then add an adjustment layer.
• 03:42 To make things simple, let's add an Exposure adjustment.
• 03:45 To darken your image a bit, decrease your Exposure and
• 03:48 then slightly increase your Gamma.
• 03:50 That should leave you with a slightly darker background image.
• 03:53 Now, just like we did for the video player, we need to key the opacity.
• 03:57 Expand that layer's contents in the Animation panel.
• 04:00 Add a key frame at the beginning of the video, and
• 04:02 then change the starting Opacity to zero percent.
• 04:05 Now, add the second key frame at the three second mark and
• 04:08 change the Opacity back up to 100%.
• 04:12 Our video is complete.
• 04:14 To save it, instead of going to File and
• 04:16 then Save, we wanna go down a little bit more to Export and then Render Video.
• 04:20 Enter a File name, choose where you wanna save it and
• 04:23 then choose your compression method.
• 04:25 QuickTime movie with an H.264 code.
• 04:27 That usually works quite well.

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