The lines between photo’s and video are getting thinner everyday. With our social media being able to display both indistinguishable on our timelines, Live Photo’s, selfie filters, etc. its become more and more practice to post video’s of our life and creations then ever. A video keeps a viewer engaged longer and with so much available media that a good thing.
Video is also becoming more beautiful and high res. 4K high resolution display are common. With that much resolution at our fingertips, there’s more room to display our photo’s and video’s. As photographers we’ve always been used to working on high resolution files. But with the possibility of adding motion to our photo’s has sparked Motion Posters and Cinemagraphs, and now Artymates
Artymate by Karen Alsop and Sandra Voelker, is a new Photoshop CC version only extension that adds animation to your images. Floating objects, moving clouds, flapping butterflies, wavy hair and even fire can be added to an image. With a simple enough interface, and a plethora of howto tutorials, you’ll be adding animations to your photo’s in no time.
Artymate comes with a standard installer and installs right into Photoshop.
The extension can be loaded from Window>Extensions>Artymate and a new window opens with all kinds of buttons.The top two buttons are your first choice. The left icon is for animating elements already in your photo. More on that in a bit.The right button (that looks like a video file) is for adding elements like smoke, particles, light, hair and fire. These are existing video elements that can be overlayed on top of your image.
the Artymate interface
Back to the first icon (the one that looks like a group of people)
From this panel you’ll start animating your elements that are already in your image.
The four arrows indicate the general direction your animation will move to.
Then there’s six choices of types of animation you can pick, there’s Free Control, Flowing, Falling, Floating, Flying and Flapping.
Each section has three or four simple buttons that direct you what to do and pushing a button will present you with a dialog box telling you what to do. Its all very self explanatory.
The Falling, Floating, Flying and Flapping sections have three buttons marked 1-2-3, and they’ll provide variations of motion, so you should definitely try and combine them.
You can repeat the steps to various parts of your animation and mix and match. With some experimentation you’ll be sure to create some interesting animations for sure. Even after your animation is done you can still go on editing your file like a normal photoshop file, layers and all.
Every section also has a little square and question mark, when you click this, it will present you with a video tutorial explaining exactly what the section does. Just below there’s an optimize button which will scale your image/animation down to a more manageable size for uploading and there’s an export button to save your animation.
My thoughts
Its a fun plugin to add subtle animations to your images, creating cinemagraph like effects. If you’ve never made video’s or animations this extension can help you right on your way. The instructions are simple to follow and there are plenty of video tutorials to learn from.
Controls are few and limited, but that keeps things simple.
I have a background in animation, which makes me biased as I am used to making complicated animations. But I do applaud quick and effective ways to create motion.
If you like what you see, Artymate is available for purchase through the website. It costs $50, and it will work with Photoshop CC. If you get your copy, make sure to share your results with us, and if you post it on Instagram, use a hashtag #artymate.
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