Animate still photography in Photoshop with Artymate, first impressions

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.

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.

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.

If you like what you see, Artymate is available for purchase through the website. It costs US$50, and it will work with Photoshop CC.
I’m not on any commission or referral kick-back – just thought it would be of interest to photographers and other nuts like me.
Your Facebook Like will help me grow.