Reverse Silhouette – photoshop trix

So I happened upon a wonderful photo on flickr that I can only describe as a reverse silhouette.

Basically the image was of the sun shining through some trees in a dark forrest with the silhouette of a woman in the middle looking like it was cut out of a layer of cloth put over the original forest shot thus revealing the  sun and the forest.

I looked and looked for a tutorial explaining how to do this but could not find one so I got ambitious and figured it out myself – curse you google and your billion results all of which are not the ones I seek

For this you’ll need two photos – one is the background and one is the source of the silhouette. I happened to take a hike this morning up by Brock University (it’s a environmental reclamation project) and snapped this shot of some wildflowers that should do the trick:

I dug through my iphoto library of about a billion photos looking for a good silhouette subject and found this one below of my wife:

The tutorial goes like this (with no appologies for lack of detail):

First the silhouette:

• a) use the magnetic tracing tool trace around your subject
• b) Use the ‘new layer from cut’ command to create a new layer of ONLY your subject
• c) on the resulting layer paint your subject black and name this layer silhouette. This is the only part of the image you care about.

Now the  background:

• a) Draw a white rectangle that covers the entire image and set its opacity to say 50%. This wil create a second layer in your background image giving the whole thing a whitish hue.
• b) Drag your silhouette layer from your silhouette image to this image and position and/or resize it to your hearts content. This creates a third layer for which you …
• c) Change the ‘layer type’ drop down (which defaults to normal) to ‘overlay’ and …

VIOLLA. It now appears as though your ‘black’ silhouette has cut through the white ‘fabric’ to expose the underlying original photo !

Now I’m wishing I had been smart enough to save the URL of the inspiration photo because it’s creator did a much better job than I did plus I REALLY don’t like to not give credit where credit is due.

If you look closely at the inspiration image you will see faintly the cheekbones and eyes of the model used and there are slight variations in opacity WRT the shoulders and such so it looks more like a 3 dimensional object rather than a straight cutout. Perhaps I should have not painted my silhouette black but instead changed its exposure to nearly zero so as to leave whatever highlights were there in place…

Regardless, I’m quite pleased with myself and have now got even MORE work to do  :)