Scene Silhouettes
Steve Weinrebe
Shortly after watching a silhouette artist in Paris cut out profiles of my wife and daughter in an astounding two minutes flat, I stumbled across this scene in a museum cafe. The technique I like to use with silhouettes of scenes, unlike silhouettes of people, allows some midtones and color to creep into the image, leaving a breath of atmosphere that wouldn't exist in a two tone silhouette.All you need to begin is to find a scene that has foreground objects against a window. This could be as simple as flowers, or two people on a couch, with a window behind. If you venture out to explore some building interiors you may find more unusual and interesting settings to work with.
Compress the tones
Step One:
As with many images finished out of Photoshop, the concept starts with the picture taking. When shooting a back-lit scene for a silhouetted image, we're best off finding a camera exposure that underexposes the foreground and overexposes the background. That isn't hard to do in a dimly lit room with bright daylight outside. If you take pictures with an automatic setting, chances are if you aim your camera at the bright daylight portion, the dimly lit portion will be nicely underexposed as with my original image below.Step 2:
Once opened in Photoshop, choose a Levels adjustment layer from the adjustment layers drop-down menu, at the bottom of the Layers palette.
Now let's compress the tones by dragging the white and black point Input sliders inward. If we want to force the tones to only blacks and whites we would drag the sliders much farther inward than pictured here. You'll see that some of the histogram's bars in the Levels window still lie to the right of the black slider, and to the left of the white slider, meaning some tones will still be visible as gray tones, as in the adjusted image below. The Layers palette shows the new Levels adjustment layer.
Created a tinted monotone
Step 3:
Applying a Black & White adjustment layer, with a tint, gives the scene just the right amount of added contrast by neutralizing all but two colors, black and the tint color. Choose Black & White from the adjustment layer drop-down menu at the bottom of the Layers palette.
In the Black & White dialog box I've left all the settings at their defaults, and simply clicked the Tint button at the bottom. This gives the image a warm sepia tone, but the color of the tint can be easily adjusted by dragging the Hue slider, or changing the opacity of the tint with the Opacity slider. Here I've used the default sepia color which sets the right mood for the subject.
Fine tune
Step 4:
Because I want to open up the midtones just a tad, I could double-click on the Levels adjustment layer to open up the Levels dialog box again, and push the black point, and white point, sliders back away from the midtone area of the Input Levels. But instead, I like to adjust the Opacity of the adjustment layer at this point of tweaking the settings, because an opacity adjustment involves fewer variables, and it's easy to retrieve 100% opacity, while the adjustment layer would have to be duplicated, or the settings saved, in order to easily retrieve the original adjustments. Why make two steps when we can make just one? Voila!
Steve Weinrebe:
MrPhotoshop.com
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