I subscribe to KelbyOne for Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials and tips and hints. Every year, they provide freebies to their members for the 12 Days of Christmas. This year, one of them was a year-long membership to PlotaVerse.

For them who don’t know — I didn’t know until today — it’s a site where you can upload a photo and add motion to it.

NOTE: while not huge, these files a tad larger than usual; Give them a few minutes to load if you have slow Internet service.

For instance, I can take this photo . . .

. . . and make it do this . . .

Mind you, I’m still learning the tool and that was my first attempt.

. . . and this was my second attempt . . .

That came from this photo . . .

It’s an interesting piece of programming that plays with how the mind perceives motion.

It also does a very good job of masking the fact that it’s playing a loop of small distortions to the image. However it does it, the illusion of motion is — in my opinion — very good.

I’ve spent a few hours playing with it and I’m learning how to make it do what I want (lots of trial and error).

For instance, this next try was a lot shorter an effort than the first two.

Original:

Final PlotaVerse version (slow-loading 31MB):

The one that took longer to get close to what I wanted came from this original . . .

It involved a lot of masking and anchor points and motion points to have the water move in a way that seemed natural.

Remember, I’m still learning; there are lots of little flaws with this final product, but I’m happy with it for the amount of time I put in and because I’m still learning.

I don’t know how much I will use this tool.

I can see the potential for making some interesting images . . . for instance . . .

Seriously, there’s something about seeing a portion of the image move while the rest is absolutely still.

It can be a bit jarring and some people probably don’t like it (I’m sure if ElBob was still with us, he’d have some acerbic comment or other about it).

Like everything else I do, I’ll play with it until I get bored or feel I’ve mastered it as much as I want to (or both).

Here’s the gallery:

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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Note: if you are not reading this blog post at DisperserTracks.com, know that it’s copied without permission, and likely is being used by someone with nefarious intentions, like attracting you to a malware-infested website.  Could be they also torture small mammals.

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