Tap Room Podcast 21: Using Pixaloop to Add Effects
One look in an app stores and you’ll find options upon options of photo apps to choose from. The goal of any developer is to stand out amongst its peers. One such app that came across my plate was Enlight Pixaloop. The goal of this app is to animate a static image and overall it does a pretty good job for quick edits to add a bit of flare to your social media postings.
Pixaloop claims anything can be animated and adding it to some of my media postings, I find the natural elements the best options to animate. So how does it work? Some images work better then others and to animate an image, my recommendation is to find a suitable combination of natural elements and your subject. Look for wind blowing in the background or river. Next, choose from the options in the menu. and in this case we’re looking at Animate, but you can also easily and automatically edit the animation’s loop, add a new animated sky, and even add camera FX like ending your little clip with a smash cut, and overlay, which means you can add things like rain or simple film grain to your image.
Out of the options, Animate is the one that requires patience and a bit of skill. To animate a section of this image – you have to draw a ‘Path’ in which the animation should flow, and then a handful of ‘Anchors’ to isolate that part of the image. The paths define the movement, while the anchors stop it from affecting static elements. As you can see from the screengrabs it can be quite fiddly.
However, it works extremely well – given enough time and effort you’ll have a nifty little animation that will elevate your social media images that extra notch.
For Pixaloop, there is a monthly subscription and at the time of this writing is was $3.99 a month for all the features, but there are free options as well.