Digital Focus: Add Motion to Your Photos

These editing tricks makes your photos come alive.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Make Your Own Motion Blur

Life is full of little paradoxes. You can find charts containing nutritional information on the wall in fast-food restaurants. You juggle your schedule and madly race across town so you won't be late for a yoga class designed to relax you and relieve stress. And people often try to capture the essence of motion in pictures, which are by their very nature static, two-dimensional, and frozen in time. That's what makes motion-themed photos so compelling, though: the notion that you can somehow capture movement and freeze it for all eternity on an unchanging computer screen or sheet of paper.

Digital techniques make it easy to add an element of motion to photos. This week we'll do just that by adding some blur to a photo of a vehicle I came to call the "Little Maruti of Horrors" on my scuba vacation in the Cayman Islands last year. If you want to follow along with the lesson, download one of my images to your hard disk and load it into an image editor (I'll use Jasc's Paint Shop Pro).

Two Strategies

In my photo the Maruti is parked on a side street in Georgetown. We'll use two different techniques to make it look like it's moving; I'll show you one method this week and then demonstrate an alternate next week.

These two digital techniques correspond to the different ways you can photograph movement, either with a film camera or a digital camera. One way to shoot a moving vehicle is to make the camera perfectly stationary and let the vehicle blur as it moves through the frame. The other method involves panning the camera with the moving vehicle. As you take the picture, the vehicle will be sharp and focused, while the background will be blurred. Let's learn how to blur the vehicle itself this week.

Practice With the Freehand Tool

For starters, in Paint Shop Pro we need to select the vehicle. In the toolbar on the left edge of the screen, click the Freehand tool (which looks like a lasso). In the Tools Options dialog box, be sure the tool is set to Smart Edge. (If you don't see the Tools Options dialog box, you can right-click on the toolbar and choose it.)

With Smart Edge enabled, click on the edge of the truck's hood and move the cursor some distance away along the hood. You'll see a selection box appear; when you click again, Paint Shop Pro automatically selects the edge of the vehicle that falls somewhere within that rectangle. Work your way around the Maruti, selecting little pieces at a time, until you're back where you started. Double-click to close the selection and encase the entire vehicle.

Adding Multiple Selections

The entire vehicle is selected, but we're not done yet. When you see motion blur--whether in a photo or in a Mighty Mouse cartoon--blur lines tend to extend beyond the rear of the moving object. That means we need to select the area in the picture that's behind the Maruti. It's easy enough to do: Just hold down the Shift key as you start selecting more real estate.

When you press the Shift key, you should see a small plus sign appear atop the lasso pointer on screen. Position the lasso at the top rear of the canvas cover and click. Now move the mouse straight back and click again at the very left edge of the photo. Move the mouse down until you're parallel with the bottom of the rear tire, click, and then position the mouse over the tire where it meets the ground. Click, and the space behind the vehicle should become part of your selection.

Time to Blur

Finally, we're ready to blur. This part is pretty easy: Choose Effects, Blur, Motion Blur from the menu. This filter blurs your picture in one direction, giving the impression of movement. Set the angle of the motion blur by adjusting the Direction control to 270 degrees, so it's pointing to the left. Maximize the Intensity (40 pixels) and click OK. You should end up with something outrageous. Can the image be improved? You bet! A little less blur would be a good start, unless you're intentionally going for a comically unrealistic effect. And the technique I'll show you next week--blurring the background--is a good alternative as well.

Dave's Favorites: Catalog Your Photos With Adobe Photoshop Album

Digital cameras let you take pictures with impunity. Since you're no longer buying film or taking your photos in for processing, you're no doubt taking more pictures than ever. The downside? Your hard disk is probably cluttered with untold legions of poorly organized and mysteriously labeled image files. What the heck is DSC997089.jpg? Finding specific photos on a hard disk with 500 images is a real hassle.

There are a variety of photo managers out there, but Adobe's brand-new Photoshop Album is my favorite. Most programs require you to painstakingly enter keywords for every one of your many photos. When you're done with that monumental task, you can search for "cat" to find all the photos that have a cat in them.

With Photoshop Album, though, you create a batch of tags that are kind of like keywords. You then drag and drop those tags, which reside on the side of the screen, onto applicable pictures. You can assign multiple tags to each photo, so a given image might be identified as a Family, Animal, and Vacation picture. Later, when you want to find a specific image, you just click on all of the tags that describe the photo, and you'll eliminate any photos from view that don't meet your search criteria. There's virtually no typing involved, and because the program is very visual, it's perfect for photographers.

Photoshop Album also features a timeline that shows when the currently selected photo was taken. You can use the timeline to further define your search: You can scroll through it to move through a sort of visual history of your photography, or you can select a specific period of time to perform your tag-based search. Want to see vacation pictures from 2001? Drag the timeline pointer back to 2001 and then click the vacation tag. Vacation pictures in Paris? Click your Paris tag as well. It's that easy.

Photoshop Album is an innovative solution to the vexing problem of digital photo management, and its under-$50 price tag makes it accessible to just about everyone. You can find it on Adobe's Web site. For the best price, go the PCWorld.com Product Finder.

Q&A: Pictures Missing on the Memory Card

I just copied a batch of photos back to my digital camera's memory card, hoping to display them on a TV using the video cable. But the camera won't display any of the pictures! What's going on? Do I need to use a special file format? I kept the images in JPEG format, so I assumed this would work.

--Jane Chapman, Bend, Oregon

There's an easy fix, Jane. Many digital cameras need to find the pictures in a specific folder on the memory card--if they're anywhere else, the camera can't see them.

To solve your problem, erase all the data from your card (you can use the camera's card format command, for instance), then take just one picture. Now take the memory card out of the camera and insert it into your PC's card reader. Find out where it stored the lone picture and place the rest of your images there. The camera should have no trouble displaying them now.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Sepia Pumpkins," by Scott Todd, Florissant, Missouri

Scott says that he took this photo with a Nikon CoolPix 995 in a pumpkin patch in Grafton, Illinois. "This was our son's first trip to a pumpkin patch, and we wanted to pick out a baby pumpkin for him. To accentuate the pumpkin I added sepia tone to the background, while increasing saturation on the pumpkin itself. We really like this photo and have it framed in our house."

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

For back issues, visit our Digital Photo Tips archive. Sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.