I'm looking to generate a silhouette of the photo below which will be used on trading cards. I'm trying to achieve the same look as the following items
The most difficult step is making the selection since the helmet and parts of the sweater blend closely into the white background and you don't have the benefit of the Quick Selection tool in CS3. So you'll have to use something like the Pen tool to create a path around the skater. Once you get the path, transform it to a selection, and go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and reduce the Lightness slider to -100.
Thanks so much for the tips & for taking the time to show me how it would look.
Now, for the next step, I want only to have the black silhouette … kind of like a piece of clip art … that can be placed on the poster/trading card. Do I need to use the white background at all or should I just cut the player out of the original file and then follow the steps you suggested? I cut the player out and just inserted it on top of a white background layout. Sorry for the remedial questions.
If you want only the silhouette you will need to save the file to a format that supports transparencies like TIFF or PNG.
You have to select out the player first, then duplicate the selection to place it on its own layer (CTRL + J in Photoshop), then you can either delete or turn off the visibility of the background layer. Save it to a file format that support transparency and you'll have the player only.
Hockey_Nut wrote:
Hi James,
Thanks so much for the tips & for taking the time to show me how it would look.
Now, for the next step, I want only to have the black silhouette … kind of like a piece of clip art … that can be placed on the poster/trading card. Do I need to use the white background at all or should I just cut the player out of the original file and then follow the steps you suggested? I cut the player out and just inserted it on top of a white background layout. Sorry for the remedial questions.
You might just take the silhouette that James has already done [or refine it to your liking] and open it in Photoshop and then make a brush. As a brush, you can stamp it anywhere ,change size and even change color and opacity.
Thanks for helping … I tried making a png but wound up with the black silhouette AND a light grey background instead of having only the silhouette. I'll keep playing around using your suggestions … hopefully I wind up with something that works!
