Continued From..
9. Click the path tab in
the layer palette window.
10. Select Make Selection in path menu. When
prompted choose feather value such as .5: experiment to taste.
11. You will see a
marquee selection of your figure/object to be clipped.
12. Select the layer
tab in the path window and click the image layer (the one with the naked girl)
to make active. (Note: at this point you can select the image and copy into a
new document layer, etc.).
13. Select Select -> Inverse.
14.
Delete selection or Select Edit -> Cut.
15. Save file in preferred
format.
Silhouetted images can be placed over any background. If you have
done a good job with it chances are good your image won't need any fine tuning.
If you see a halo around it when you place it over a new background etc., simply
use the erasing techniques from above to shave that sweet amateur image just
enough to eliminate any remaining background pixels.
Bonus! Cast a shadow.
Using some of the skills we have acquired so far,
as an added bonus we can create a realistic dropshadow with our silhouetted
image. Assuming you created a path, you can kick it up a notch here. Begin with
the image file open and the image layer selected in the layer palette
window.
1. Select the path tab of the layer palette window.
2. Select the
working path layer created above.
3. Select Make Selection from the
path palette menu.
4. Select Select -> Feather and choose a value
from 2-10 or so: experiment to taste.
5. Click the foreground swatch and
select a value of black for your shadow color in the color picker. Try a value
between 65% and 85%: experiment to taste.
6. Click layer tab in layer palette
window and select Create New Layer in layer palette menu or click new
layer icon at palette bottom.
7 Select Edit -> Fill with chosen
foreground color.
8. Select Edit -> Transform ->
Scale/Perspective/Skew/etc. and freely scale the new layer down to create
shadow. You can position the copied layer to simulate shadows from any angle of
light source. This is usually contingent on the image itself.
File Optimization - Get Ready for the Web
Ok, so now we've made some
title graphics with different effects and we want to get them up on our new
site. We will need to convert our files to optimized jpeg or gif files. Most
image editing programs such as Coral Draw, Paint Shop Pro,
PhotoImpact, Picture Publisher - all have the ability to output
for these formats built-in. The links below offer some freeware or shareware
solutions in case you (like me) are running your business on a
budget.
