Hong Kong Zoom (Exclusive Tutorial)

Do you want to create an amazing avatar? Do you want to make it remarkable? Then this tutorial is for you. Here I will tell you how to create an unusual effect, bright and eye-catching. Here it is, have a look.

It looks like a never ending approach to the city. It is based on 2 layers, one near and one distant, slightly rotated and magnified, then the color is inverted and layers are put back to their initial position. While inverting the color it is hard to keep everything in its place. So, it appears to be on a permanent approach. But everything will appear in its turn.

First, take two similar pictures of a city at night. I selected a couple of pictures of Hong Kong .

This one will be the background (I'll call it Background Hong Kong)

Click to enlarge

And this one will be the foreground - (I'll call it Foreground Hong Kong)

Don't worry about different size. The most important thing is that they fit in style and color.

Open the foreground image in Photoshop, and using the Extract Tool cut the front building out of the background. You can learn more about Extract Tool in this tutorial.

Don't worry about perfection when cutting the buildings out - all the defects will be hidden.

Now, open the background image in Photoshop and drag the cut out foreground layer to it. Next, move it to the specified place with the help of Move tool, just like I did with this one:

We've finished our work in Photoshop. Let's switch to ImageReady.

Duplicate Hong Kong Background and Foreground layers. Select the duplicated Foreground Hong Kong layer and press Ctrl+T. Make the following changes: move the rotation control point to the lower left corner (that one, which is in the center by default), make the rotation angle -1, press the Constrain Aspect Ratio button, and increase the width by 10 pixels.

Do the same for Background Hong Kong, but this time make rotation angle +1. Also you can increase the width by 20 pixels instead of 10.

Now using the Crop tool resize the picture to match the size of the smaller one. You should have something like this:

Click to enlarge

Now duplicate each layer and invert their color.

Click to enlarge

Here comes the most interesting part - animation. Create 4 frames in the Animation Panel (3 more than the one you have)

Leave visible 2 initial layers, Background and Foreground for the first frame: (beginning of animation, everything in its place).

For the second frame leave visible 2 initial layers with rotation: Background Copy and Foreground Copy (the city rotates a bit as if we are approaching it).

For the third frame leave visible 2 initial inverted layers: Background Invert and Foreground Invert (the city goes back in its place, but the colors are inverted and the human eye cannot recognize the rotation back).

For the forth frame leave visible 2 inverted layers with rotation: Background Copy Invert and Foreground Copy Invert (color changes back to normal, but rotation has just occurred).

That ' s it . Make the visible 0.1 second and Save the results.