Friday, March 10, 2017

Plotagraph Pro Mini-Review & Discount - Animate your still photographs!

Unedited Fujifilm X-E2 Waterfall animated using Plotograph Pro
Unedited image from a Fujifilm X-E2 converted to a GIF after Plotograph Pro edits on waterfall

If you read my Flixel review, you learned how to take a video and convert it into a moving image called a cinemagraph. It's cool, but it assumes you shot video, so what if you had a still photo that was ripe for animation like the waterfall shot above? This is where Plotagraph Pro enters the picture.

How it works

Plotagraph Pro allows you to create a mask of what you would like to animate and set the speed and technique used to make it come to life. While masking is never fun, I found the tools to be easy enough to use and generally speaking you don't have to be incredibly precise when the viewing area is just on computer monitors (even for my 32" 4k display).

Click to see the UI with markup in the water

Using one of your still images, you can use the web or desktop app (which seems to leverage the web app) to mark which portions of your UI you wish to animate. Click on the image above to see what the markup looks like.

From there you can accept the defaults, choose a preset or dial in your own animation values before you click play (or export) to let the magic happen. Here's what that UI looks like:

Animation Properties

Videos

While you can save your animations in a variety of formats, the highest quality is in video so I've created some that you should VIEW AT FULL SCREEN to see how cool these things can be.

Japanese Stream

This animation only took about 5 minutes to create as the masking was pretty easy. The biggest mistake I made the first go around was getting too close to the rocks or the edge of the water. Cleaning up my mistakes after the first animation was easy and I was pleased with the results.

Waterfall

Feeling confident, I tried to do the waterfall using the automated masking tool and this one was completed in less than a minute. I loved the results, so I moved on to something a little harder.

Japanese Lake

This image took a little more time to mask, but only 5 minutes. However, I admit this one could still use some more work. With that said, after a little trial and error I had this one looking like you see here in about 15 minutes - not bad!

Conclusion

In minutes I was able to take two unedited photos (waterfall and lake) and bring them to life - that's pretty cool especially for sharing with your friends. What's more, if you keep the videos small enough then they'll auto play on Instagram or Facebook so you can have high quality video without requiring your viewers to hit play.

While I did this product a disservice by only showing you examples that animate water, I think you can see how easily it can bring your images to life. While I'm not a fan of its subscription model for pricing, I have arranged a discount. You can limit your cost by only signing up for a month, and you can even CLICK HERE for a FREE DEMO if you just want to check it out!

It should also be noted that you can download your videos, images, etc... so YOU CAN KEEP YOUR CONTENT if you cancel your subscription. Yes, you'll lose access to the software to edit your files, but there's no risk to trying it out. Go play with it for a few months on some of your favorite images and see what you think - I think you'll enjoy it! I thought it was a blast to use so I highly recommend it!

Where to Buy? [DISCOUNT OFFER]

Click here learn more using my 10% discount coupon code

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today, and use coupon code RONMART to save 10%!

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1 comment:

Sykanda said...

Hi

All very good but did you know about this in the TOU:

" Plotagraph does not claim any ownership rights in the Content that you submit, post, upload, or import to the Site or the Software, or to the Outputs created therewith using the Software. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you hereby grant to Plotagraph a non-exclusive, fully payed and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, publicly perform, publicly display, or reproduce such Content and Outputs on the Site and in other advertising materials to advertise the Site and/or the Software."?