light and silhouette effect help

[bellyboy]

i am new to using photoshop and saw this picture and would love to recreate the effect for a project im doing. can anyone tell me how to do the light and silhouette effect shown in he attached pic. thanks

[Bosso]

This actually isn't as hard as it might seem. The trick is really that the existing lighting the the image you want to convert to a silhouette needs to be right.

Without posting a whole tutorial, you can try the following steps (I'm working with 5.5 so it might be slightly different in different versions of photoshop)...

1) First, separate your subjects from the background. You can use the extract tool to do this (CTRL-ALT-X on PC).

2) Create a dupe of your extracted layer

3) Fill the bottom layer with black

4) Now, Image->Adjust->Threshold and move the slider until you have your desired highlight

5) At this point, I typically apply a small blur on the highlight layer to make it a bit fuzzy and get rid of jaggies.

6) Create a background that makes sense for your highlight and place your silhouette on top. Use distortions or whatever to get your desired effect.

Again, this process will only work if you have a decently highlighted image to start with. Otherwise, you are probably stuck trying to do it by hand. I've attached an example for you to look at.



Hope this helps,

Bosso

[bellyboy]

thanks very much, im trying that now. thanks again.