Social media is a tough challenge these days. It can feel like an impossible task to make your photos stand out from the crowd and get those precious likes, comments, and follows. Well, this new program from software company Corel might be able to give your photos the wow factor, that will make them grab people’s attention. PhotoMirage takes your pictures and brings them to life by animating certain elements but keeping others static. It turns your photos into mirages that move, or something very similar to cinemagraphs.
Cinemagraphs take videos and then hold certain parts of the frame still while other regions continue to move. When looped, the result is a still image that has moving parts. PhotoMirage does something similar but makes the whole process much more straightforward by allowing photographers to bring their pictures to life. The program creates a much simpler process than that needed to create a cinemagraph.
PhotoMirage works with JPEGs, RAW files, TIFFS, and PNG files. To add animation to an image, you add drag-and-drop motion points to the image and then set static points that will be protected from the motion.
It works really well with bodies of water or nature scenes like clouds in sky or fields of wheat. With a bit of imagination, however, nothing is stopping PhotoMirage from bringing all sorts of images to life, like this close-up of somebody’s eye.
Once images have been animated, they can be formatted especially for various social media platforms or saved directly to hard drive.
The program is only available for Windows PCs running Windows 7 or later. It has a one-off cost of $69.95, but if you think you’d like to give it a try, Corel offers a free trial.
