3 Ways To Create Motion Effects In Pixelmator Pro

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at some quick ways to add motion effects to your photos with Pixelmator Pro.

So adding motion effects is a common thing that people do in Photoshop. But how do you do it in Pixelmator Pro? 

As an example here I'm going to take this JPEG of a woman running and I'm going to apply a motion effect to emphasize the fact that she's moving. So, I'm going to Drag & Drop this into Pixelmator Pro to create a new document here.  As you can see I've got this one image layer here. Now a common way to add motion is to add a motion blur filter. This is fairly easy to do. With this layer selected I can go to the Effects Tool here, click Add Effect, select Motion. I can set the angle but it is already set to horizontal which is what we want here, and I can set the radius. The only problem here is that, of course, it blurs her as well as the background. Ideally you just want to blur the background and leave her untouched. 

So, let's go and remove that effect and first I'm going to separate her from the background. It's easy to do this in Pixelmator Pro because you can go to Edit, Select Subject, and it's going to use AI to figure out the subject and just them. Now it's not going to be perfect. In this case there's going to be plenty of places where it kind of gets it wrong. So you can see this area here. I'm going to use some of the Selection Tools, like for instance the Free Selection, to be able to add. I'm going to hold the Shift Key down and Add this section here. I'm going to hold the Option Key down a deselect a section here. But it is also handy to use Quick Selection. I'll press Q and I can use the Shift Key here and easily select areas, like that, to add them very quickly and remove them very easily to get what I want. So I'm going to go through this whole image and try to refine it a little bit. There's definitely some things here that I want. Then once I get everything I want I've got a selection this just includes the runner. The subject. 

I'm going to use a quick Command C and Command V to copy and paste her in a separate layer. Now this layer is just on top of the original layer. So if I actually turn it Off you don't see any difference. If I turn Off the background you can see I just have her. I'm going to use Command D here to deselect. 

So now that I've got her on a separate layer I can blur just the background layer. I'm going to select that and then I'm going to go to the Effects here. Add an Effect. Motion blur the background. Add more or less of a radius. You can see it's nice because not only does it blur the background but you could see it's blurring here as well but behind this other layer that has a clear view of here. So it creates a great sense of motion here. It really didn't take that many steps to do this. 

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Now another way people like to do this is very similar to this but instead of blurring the entire background only blur what's behind the object in motion. So I'm going to Undo here to take away the motion blur effect for the background completely. What I'm going to do is instead of adding the effects to the background I'm going to click the Plus Button here in Layers and I'm going to add an effects layer. So you can see it as an Effects Layer on top of the image layer here. Now, once I add the Motion Blur, you can see it's applied here and it's applied to what's underneath. So I don't have it permanently applied to the layer. It's something I can adjust. I can even turn it Off, like that. 

Another thing I can do is I can Mask it. If I Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on that layer I can add a mask. It's going to add a complete mask. So just all white here so I don't really see any difference. But if I were to draw over an area using, say, a black color you could see the white here and I'll do a larger brush size. You can see the black spot here. This part is actually clear. I can actually clear out parts because the part under black isn't going to be motion blurred and the parts that are white are going to be motion blurred. So I'm going to Undo that and I'm going to, instead, select the polygonal selection here and select kind of the area behind her, like this. It's kind of this cone behind her, like that. I'm going to follow the contours of her body so it's just this area behind. I'm going to use Option Delete to take that chunk out from here. So you can see it's clear behind her and blurred in front. Use Command D to deselect. 

I'm going to Control Click on this and say Invert That. I want the opposite. I want it blurred behind her and clear in the front. So now I've basically done a blur that's only behind her so you can see with her legs there how it is nice and clear on the front edge and it's blurred going back. So another really cool effect that you can use to create motion. 

Let's get rid of that effects layer and go back to this and do another cool effect. I'm going to actually select this layer here and Control Click it and duplicate it. I'm going to do that three times. So I've got four copies of her. I'm going to leave the top one alone. But this one I'm going to select and I'm going to select the Arrangement Tool and then use Shift and Left Arrow to move that copy of her back 30 pixels. I'm going to do this one 60. This one 90. Like that. So you can see what I'm going for. Now all I need to do is with the back-most layer, set the Opacity down to 10% and then the next layer set that to 20% and then the next layer after that set that to 30%. Now you can see I've got a nice motion thing going on there. 

Now you can combine these. I can go here to this layer. Let's add an Effects Layer there and add motion to it. So now I've created this nice motion blur all the way at the back. But one thing it is doing is it is kind of interfering because she is blurred as well. It's kind of interfering with what's there. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to this layer here and I'm going to select the subject again. Control S is the shortcut here for selecting the subject. So she is selected and ideally I'd want to do this at the beginning so I'd refine it here. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to use this tool, the Repair Tool, and I can click Repair Selection and it's going to repair the selection there. In other words it is going to use basically AI to figure out what might be back here. Now it is going to get it very wrong. You can see here some of the junk you get there. That's okay because remember we're covering her up. First we're doing the Motion Blur, so it's all blurry. Then we're going to add all of these layers back in. Now we have her nice and clear with the shadows going back like that, but no blur of her at all. But the background is nice and blurred here using the Motion Effect that we want like that to create yet another version that combines the things we were doing before to create a nice motion effect all using Pixelmator Pro. 

So those are not the only ways to do motion effects in Pixelmator Pro. There are tons of other ways you can combine things and use different effects in Pixelmator Pro to create some motion there. You can experiment with them. I just hope this gave you some ideas and encourages you to experiment with things like this in Pixelmator Pro. Thanks for watching.