Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Tutorial Tuesday: How to Turn Your Creative Photos into Silhouettes
Today’s tutorial is simple, but sometimes we all just want something creative that we can do quickly, right?
Today, I’m going to talk about how to turn your creative photos into silhouettes, which can give you endless artistic possibilities!
I recently took some staged photos of a friend’s daughter with some balloons, and had intended to do something much different with it, but ended up with this fun silhouette, and I’m pretty happy with it. My original intention was to make a composite piece of artwork of a little girl flying away with the balloons, but sometimes simpler is better.
Here is how I did it, using Photoshop:
(1) Shot the photo against a black background (but you could use any solid color). Truth be told, I actually combined multiple photos for this picture to get the pose I wanted. This picture is a combination of one where the girl is sitting and holding the balloons as high as she can (so the balloons aren’t higher than my back drop). and two where her mother is holding her hand, so she can lean forward a bit and balance on her toes.
(2) Selected black as a color, cleaned up the edges a bit, and deleted the background.
(3) Softened the edges a bit with a gaussian blur.
(4) Turned the exposure of the image all the way down until it turned black.
(5) Added a white background.
I’ll probably still work on the composition a little bit, but I haven’t really been happy with the backgrounds that I’ve been experimenting with yet. I recently purchased a book about building photographic compositions, and am hoping to pick at my idea after I work through the book a bit more. Until then, please enjoy the silhouette and tutorial. :)
