photoshop-advice

[jajamen]

Hi,

Does anyone have an idea how you can easilly make silhouette-pictures out of photos. By this I mean when the dark parts oh the photo are modified to include only one color/different shades of the same color. The light parts would be white... Kind of che guevara-picture style if you get what I mean...

I suck at photoshop, use mainly illustrator... (have cs3:s)

I appreciate any advice

/K

[budafist]

Adjust the levels until you get what you want. The words you are looking for are high contrast. Silhouettes are a bit different.

[hewligan]

The Che Guevara pictures really just black and white, sometimes with the background coloured. For that, use Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold.

For a similar result, but with more colours, try Image -> Adjustments -> Posterize.

[DesignVHL]

If you just want Silhouettes on a white or colored background, you could use the pen tool and draw a vector shape layer also - that can give you a cleaner edge sometimes, if threshold doesn't get you what your after. The cutout filter would be another one to try along with Posterizing.

[Broacher]

Another very powerful method is to use a Gradient Mapping adjustment layer. By carefully adding and editing points of the gradient used, you can reassign bold solid colours across the original's tonal range (and it's non-destructive AND re-editable). In the gradient editor which pops up if you click on the gradient in the Grad Map setup, use Alt-drg to dupe an existing colour point and this is useful in creating sharp colour transitions.

The other nice thing about this method is that as a layer you can easily drag it to another image and of course, apply it through a layer mask, or get new effects by twiddling with the layer blending controls and modes.

[jajamen]

thanks for the advice to all of you :)