PhotoMirage

If one of your hobbies is photography and like manipulating your photos in order to create some works of art, you might also enjoy creating subtle animations from your images by using specialized software.

PhotoMirage is one of the applications mentioned above that can help you turn some of your pictures into animated versions in a simple and effective manner.

As stated above, this program can be used to animate certain parts of your pictures by applying an effect that's similar to liquefying the photo, so that it seems that those objects are moving.

An example where you can use this application on would be a picture of your subject near water or doing some water-related activities like rafting. You just need to select the areas you want to animate (mainly the water), set some anchor points for areas that you don't wish to animate and hit the "Play" button.

After you created the selection points, you can also set the speed at which the animation will be played by either dragging the slider bar left or right or typing the desired value directly in the designated field.

More so, you can mask certain areas and work with layers if your image is a more complex one and if you have the necessary skills to do so. Images can also be automatically adjusted and manually cropped from the toolbar.

The final step is saving your project on your computer and that can be easily done by using the "Save" function under the "File" menu. However, if you want to share it online, you can do it just as easily by clicking the share button at the bottom of the screen.

Here you can select from a wide range of online services such as Facebook, Flickr, Google Photos, YouTube or Twitter to upload your creation, but also customize some of its parameters, like the file type, image size, animation loop duration, frame rate, codec and quality.

If you're looking for a quick, convenient way to make some of your pictures "come to life," you might consider using PhotoMirage. It's easy to use, features some handy tutorials and lets you upload your creation to several websites directly from the application.