A super easy way to add motion to an edit is to apply a motion blur filter. I know it's so obvious it seems silly, but there is definitely more to it than just slapping a filter on top of your image. First of all you have to decide what is in motion and what direction it's going in. For "The Retreat" I knew that he (the dragon ... well subsequently Niall too, I guess) would be charging towards the left side of the frame, so the angle of my motion blur was easy enough to figure out. I was attempting to emulate the look you get when you pan the camera following along with a moving subject. For example, if you were to try to take a picture of a passing motorcycle, you could track it in the center of your frame, then when you snap the photo the motorcycle would be more or less crisp and the background would have the motion blur.
Read MoreTake the Transform Tools to the Next Level
So obviously almost every Photoshop novice has "transformed" something in Photoshop. As in, "I just dragged this image onto my canvas and it's way too flippin' huge. Let me make it smaller with the transform function." But how many of you have really taken it much further than that? (Yes, I know there are exceptions; we are all at different levels of expertise.) Transforming seems like a pretty simple/straightforward thing to do in Photoshop - you're just re-sizing something, right? Well with a little creativity, not only can you transform the size of something, you can completely transform a handful of random images of, say, lizards into a freakin baby dragon! WHAT!?!?
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