The work flow is getting faster and faster. A few tips found this time round;

1. Using the correct blend of filters in PS allows you to cut down on the number of colours, these are actually at 128 bit colour and no real lose of quality has occurred.
2. Export is king, ticking transparency on, reduces the image size.. Strange i know! Adding a transparency layer would surly add to the file size, apparently not.
3. Number of frames matters - lower number means you can up the export settings, makes sense.

Oh and one last point.. Tumblr is a pain for hosting Gif’s.. Remember it always needs to be under 500px by 500px and if you want to loop forever (and not just play once, then freeze) it needs to be under 1mb.. That’s quite a restriction, if anyone can suggest any alternative Gif Hosting solutions (excluding off your own domain) i’d be grateful to hear from you. Please comment below!

Keep Giff’in!

Something that has captured my imagination this week was this video seen on Mashable, the question i’ve been asking myself have Gif’s evolved, or even matured into a new form of Art called Cinemagraphs? Well today Ben over at RSK and I had a rather lengthy discussion on whether this was a “new” Art Form so we decided to create our own. We packed up our boards to go for a surf and hit the South Devon coast, an iconic location to test the water and here is the result.

GIFs are one of the oldest image formats used on the web. Throughout
their history, they have served a huge variety of purposes, from
functional to entertainment.

With Technology more accessible (everyone has an SLR, right?) and with more people able to go out and snap photos, it leaves grounds for different forms of self-expression and that’s what i feel Cinemagraphs (Gifs) have become. This new more mature form of animated imagery.

In my exploration i’ve already picked up a few tips if you want to try your own;

• Ensure your subject doesn’t move much and the area around where you want to animate doesn’t move at all. 
• Use video instead of continuous shooting mode, it makes it much easier when importing your Cinemagraph.
• Bare in mind colour.. As the Gif format is only able to display 256 different colours you are some what limited in what you can shoot. aPNG’s (Animated PNG’s) allow 32bit colour but it would seem a lot of web browsers are not supportive of this format yet.. /sigh.
• Reverse your animation so it always goes back to your starting position.
• Use masks on groups of layers (saves a lot of repetition) and also use Adjustment Layers to change tone, colour, contrast etc. Both of which are non-destructive so you don’t end up deleting or altering the original pixels!
• Outside shooting is hard work! Unless its a perfect windless day because your scene will move regardless, i’m not saying its impossible just harder!

Personally i love it, they capture the essence of the moment; the minor bit of movement brings to life, the feelings, the emotions and the story, behind the second that photo was taken. I expect i’ll be making more of these. The groundwork has already been laid for Nicky (over at coco-nom-de-plume blog) and myself to attempt some more, so stay tuned!!

In the meantime what do you think, are Cinemagraphs a “NEW” Art Form? Have you made any yourself? We’d love to see and share them, if you have feel free to post them below in the comments!! Photo posting is enabled!!

Andrew