The evolution from GIF to Cinemagraph

With the arrival of the Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820, you’re able to create great GIF-like images using an exclusive Nokia app called Cinemagraph. But what is a Cinemagraph? Isn’t it just a GIF? Well, yes, but there’s one thing that’s different.

A GIF is an acronym for Graphic Interchange Format – a bitmapimage format.

People have been using GIFs since the format was created in 1987 and its popularity is partly due the fact you can compress the image to make it much smaller in size without degrading the quality of the image. However, it only has a colour palette of 256 colours.

In addition to this, GIFs can be animated – quite unusual for an image. This was ideal many years ago when videos would’ve taken up much needed disk space and would’ve taken a long time to download or stream.

Using a GIF also makes it very easy to embed into a website. You just upload the image and people will see a moving image; albeit a relatively small, slightly grainy one.

Here are some standard animated GIFs.

Via GIFtube

As you can see, the whole image is a moving image, much like a video. And that’s because they are, but they’ve been adapted for the GIF format.

The following images are Cinemagraphs (not taken with a Nokia Lumia).

Via – irol.trasmonte

Via mendhak

Via irol.trasmonte

As you can see the quality of the images are much better than an ordinary animated GIF; they’re not grainy, they are vivid.

With an animated GIF, it’s usually clear that you’re looking at an animated GIF. However, when you look at a Cinemagraph, you almost believe you’re looking at an actual video.

The wine from the bottle in the first image just keeps flowing, while everything else remains still. The cogs at the heart of the robot are the only parts that move and the flame on the candle in the last image flickers away while the child looks on in freeze-frame.

Now the Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 have become available, you’ll be able to create similar images to the Cinemagraphs above.

Are you looking forward to making Cinemagraphs on your new Lumia? What will you create? Sound off in the comments section below.

image credit: irol.trasmonte