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iSilhouettes
Boldness accents simplicity as key to successful art BY BRADLEY WILSON
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Photos and photo illustrations by Austin Dowd
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Parker is a college freshmen, less than six months out of high school. But he doesn’t seem to have any problem adjusting to a large university. He never wears a shirt to class (although some instructors make him put on a shirt in the classroom). He owns only three pairs of shoes: neon green, bright yellow and day-glo orange. To top it off, he wears a bow tie and rides a skateboard around campus. So when it came to selecting students for our yearbook’s division page, he was a natural for the student life section. Given that our theme evolved around the first-person i — borrowed from the iPod — the graphic identity was obvious. After selecting the model, we brought him in to our little make-shift studio (a large piece of white paper taped up on the wall and coming out onto the floor) and had him do skateboarding tricks. The action was critical to the success of the image. The white background made knocking out the background much easier. Parker and the other models also made it successful by having something to highlight: a school logo, shoe laces or uniform accents. KNOCK-OUTS To separate the subject from the background, Austin, our yearbook managing editor, used Photoshop’s Extract filter, by far the easiest tool to use for knock-outs. If we didn’t desire so much detail along the edges, particularly in the hair, we could have used the pen tool to give a sharp edge as opposed to the slightly rough edge indicative of a bit-mapped image as opposed to a vector-based image (one created using lines and curves instead of pixels).
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Creating the knock-outs initially takes about 30 minutes per image. Then it takes another hour or so to clean up the edges. With a clean image, select the person and create a silhouette by filling the selected area with black. HIGHLIGHTS To bring back some of the highlights, critical for the effect, use the Select Color Range option. This is simple but still involves making multiple selections. For Parker, this meant making a selection to highlight (a) his bow tie and (b) his shoe laces and (c) the wheels on his skateboard. A final use of the Color Range option was used to rid the rest of the detail from his body. A simple click of the Magic Wand on his black shorts and use of the Brightness/Contrast dialog box brought out detail in the edges of his shorts. The silhouette layer remained in the background, but unwanted objects were erased so the solid silhouette would show through. BACKGROUND Save the final image, which is on a transparent background, as a Photoshop document (.PSD). Importing it into Adobe InDesign means there’s no need to go to the trouble of creating a clipping path. Use the saturated, bright, almost fluorescent colors adopted by Apple for their iPod campaign. Define them as spot colors or process colors, and fill a box with them for the background. n
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Step by step STEP 1 Use the Extract filter in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 or later. It is, by far, one of the most efficient tools Adobe has added to the arsenal. It’s efficient and accurate. Take your time. The more precise your painting of the edges, the better the knock-out will be.
Utilizing Photoshop’s Extract filter involves four steps: 1. Using the Edge Highlighter Tool, paint the edges (green by default) by using a relatively small brush, say size 10. Modify the outline or fix mistakes by using the Eraser Tool. Hold down the Command (Control) key to utilize “Smart Highlighting.” 2. Using the Fill tool, paint the area inside the green outline (the area you want to keep) blue. 3. Preview. (Click on the Preview button in the upper-right corner of the screen.) 4. Polish edges using the Cleanup Tool and Edge Touchup Tool. Then click OK to complete the process.
STEP 2 Color correct and tone the photograph as you would any other photo. Make sure the flesh tones are accurate and the white balance is correct. STEP 3 Save the file as a Photoshop (.PSD) document. The background will remain transparent. STEP 4 Using the Magic Wand tool, select the transparent background. To ensure that you get all the background, even parts that are not contiguous, go to Similar under the Select Menu. Then go to Inverse under the Select menu to get the subject, not the background, selected. STEP 5 Create a new layer in the Layers palette. Keep the selection active. STEP 6 On this new layer, fill the selection with the foreground color (black). (Edit Fill … or Command + Delete). Now you have two layers, one with a silhouette and another with the full-color image. Name this layer “Silhouette.” STEP 7 To establish good habits, now create a duplicate of the original four-color image layer and name that layer “Original.” Name the other four-color layer “Whites,” which is the layer in which we’re going to do most of the work. But if we screw up, we’ve got the original to go back to. STEP 8 In the “Whites” layer, go to Select Color Range. For Parker, we first selected the red bow tie. After it has been selected, desaturate it (remove the color from this area) by going to Image Adjustments Hue/Saturation and dragging the Saturation slider all the way to the left. With this selection still active, increase the brightness and contrast of the area by using the Image Brightness/Contrast slider. Repeat this process for his shoelaces and skateboard wheels. Because his shorts were black, we selected them with the Magic Wand tool and altered them with Brightness/Contrast to get the highlights of the edges. Finally, again using the Select Color Range option, select his body and fill that selected area with black to remove all unwanted detail. STEP 9 This process isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s necessary to erase items in the Whites layer allowing the Silhouette layer to show through. We’ve also found it works best to desaturate the image at the end and to delete the color layer before saving the final image.
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