Digital Focus: Add Motion to Your Photos

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.