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Silhouette Tutorial
This tutorial
is for Adobe Photoshop 7.
First, choose a picture you want to make a silhouette
Now, duplicate the background layer - Layer>Duplicate Layer...:
Now, on the new layer, we're going to desaturate it: Image>Adjustments>Desaturate:
We're now going to edit the brightness & contrast - Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast...:
Now, a new window will pop up, and it will look like this:
Now, it's trial and error with this bit - basically, we want to get the image looking as black & white as possible, without loosing too much detail:
Now, that's looking alright! Now, duplicate that layer again. On the top layer, we're going to play around, so we loose some of the detail now. Go to Filter>Artistic>Cutout...
No. of Levels indicates how many different shades of grey you want in the picture. We still want to keep plenty of detail, so we set it to the maximum of 8. Edge simplicity indicates how many edges you want, ie, how much detail. Edge Fidelity is how true to the original picture you want the edges to be. Play around with them, and you'll see in the preview the different effects they produce.
Now your picture should be looking a little like this:
Now we want to up the contrast again. Go back to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast... now, just move the contrast slider up until you've lost a shade of gray. Around +60 does the job here:
Now, that'll do for the silhouette. Now we're going to crop the image down to 100x100 for an icon.
Now, create a new layer. Fill it with any colour, or gradient, or texture you like. I'm just going to use a copy of the background layer (the original, coloured picture), set to multiply, gaussian blurred, ontop of all the other layers, with a bit of sandstone texture. Complicated, I know, but dont worry about it - just add whatever you like to the new layer, and set it to a blend mode like multiply, or screen - it's entirely up to you.
Of course, practice makes perfect, and this is just a quick way of doing this sort of effect. Play with it!
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