Friday 17 June 2011

my pictures (by request)

as requested by The Dr's Wife from Mumsnet, here is a simple tutorial -


Choose your picture you want to use. I have chosen a photo of Lola, in Aberystwyth out side the camera obscurer. 





Find your pen tool for quick selection and highlight the area you want (you may need to use the magic eraser tool to sharpen up edges)

Press ctrl, alt and J – this makes your selection on another layer


Rename your selected area on the new layer as THRESHOLD – you’ll see why in a bit





Now you should have two layers, one called BACKGROUND and one THRESHOLD



Now that we have the main subject on its own layer, we're going to hide the background from view and replace it with a solid colour



First, click on the Background layer to select it. Then, with the Background layer selected, click on the New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:


 Choose a colour you like 

You will now have a solid colour as your back ground 



Next we need to convert the main subject to black and white and remove most of the detail, and we can do that easily using photoshop’s Threshold adjustment. First, click back on the "threshold" layer to select it in the Layers palette. Then, go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, select Adjustments, and then select Threshold. This brings up the Threshold dialog box:






Decide what threshold your picture looks best at, then you may like to play around with the back ground effects to create shadows / patterns etc


this is by far not the best, but a quick demo - it's rather simple
finished






these are ones I've done before 



See – simple!

9 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing, looks very cool.

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  2. Fantastic. I did manage to do it and it looks great! Thank you for taking the timr to teach me.

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  3. OMG that is awesome. Rushing off to do mine now. Thank you!

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  4. These look great! Would you be able to tell me which Photoshop package you used please? (I'm new to all this!) Thanks

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  5. Thank you Karen!

    I have photoshop cs3 version 10.0

    is that any help?

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  6. Thank you! Going to check it out now.

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  7. Wow, that is so cool! Thanks for sharing. I'm going to try to figure out hoe to do it in GIMP as I don't have photoshop, but it should be pretty similar...

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