Wide's World

Eating Pussy Pixels

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Widearea

Porno-Graphix

Many months back, in an adult webmaster's chatroom somewhere, a user entered the room with an unusually enticing handle, something like pinklips69, or some such. After the sharks had been beaten down and general order restored to the forum, our hottwat4U or something or other, offered up to the room the invitation to see pictures of her shaved pussy. She was claiming she had pictures and there were at least a dozen adult webmaster hounds waiting to spring on the url as she proceeded to reveal it all to us. One lurker finally chimed in, "I hope we ain't about to see a picture of her cat with a haircut." And sure enough, as we feverishly typed, we were all staring at a pitiful looking tabby with no hair. We had been duped.

In this business of purveying quality adult entertainment to the masses, there surely is more than one way to skin a cat. This week we'll look at one or two ways to silhouette images and get our titles from last week's column ready for our sites. If you've been following along you should have a few different title graphics in your creative arsenal that you want to use on one of your next sites. And just to keep things fresh, we'll take a naked girl and remove her from her natural surroundings so we can do with her what we will. Silhouetting images allows us the freedom to manipulate our licensed content in many different ways, and is a common skill for any graphic designer. Our web graphics should help to bolster sales. They should be an expression of our creativity, but always concepted with the sale in mind.

More Tools From the Toolbar
For our jaunt today we will want to get comfortable with the eraser tool, the magnifying glass/zoom tool and the pen tool. Below you can see where they are located in the Photoshop toolbar.

Method One
The quickest and dirtiest way to silhouette an object is to simply erase the background. Using the eraser tool and the zoom tool, you can accomplish this. The secret is to zoom in close enough to erase the background without interfering with your image, as well as to find the brush that is easiest for you to work with.
1. Select File -> Open and locate the image on you local drive that you want to silhouette.
2. Select the zoom tool in the toolbar.
3. Click and drag the zoom tool in a small area of your image to zoom in.

4. Select Window -> Show/Hide Brushes and bring the brushes palette into view.
5. Click to select a smaller sized brush with a feathered edge in the brushes palette.



6. Select the eraser tool from the toolbar.
7. Click and drag the eraser in the image area to remove the background portion of image. It is always best to work from your corners out. As my art teacher always said, "don't paint yourself into a corner." This has always been good advice.



8. Continue out from all corners until entire background is erased.
9. Save file in preferred format.

Method Two
Let's assume we were making a print ad and we needed to silhouette an image for a typographic runaround, or for placement on a colored background, etc. The best way to do this is to create a clipping path. By using the pen tool we can draw a path around the image to cut it out of the background. With the path palette menu we can make our silhouette selection as follows:
1. Select File -> Open and locate the image on you local drive that you want to silhouette.
2. Select the zoom tool in the toolbar.
3. Click and drag the zoom tool in a small area of your image to zoom in.
4. Select the pen tool in the toolbar.
5. Click to insert an origin point at the edge of the outermost pixel of the image you are clipping.
6. Click and drag the next point to follow the contour of your image. The idea is to create your path so it eats into the outer pixels of your image.

7. Continue to insert points and constrain with the pen tool as above. You can hold down the spacebar to scroll the page with the hand tool as you go.
8. Follow the edge of your image all the way around until your last point joins the first point. If there are any holes in your image, you will have to use the pen tool to create an additional path inside that area.

Continued ..