Sometimes simple is best. An unadorned white background and the gaze of the subject can be more than enough to communicate personality; the plainness of the setting can invest the image with great emotional power.
And sometimes simple stinks.
Sometimes a white background gives us the picture equivalent of highway blindness and we can hardly look for a second before moving on. Lucky for us, we don’t have to put up with blah, boring pictures because we have image editors, and with them we can make anything look pretty much any way we want. Being creative—that is, messing around and irreverently making images we could have never made with film, at least not as quickly—is exhilarating.
Part of the fun of taking anyone’s portrait is showing them the picture, and letting them see themselves in a way they never knew they could look. This project takes that idea further, totally replacing much of the detail with, well, anything you want.
It works best with images already shot on a white or gray background. If you want to try it on a pic with another kind of background, you have to select what’s behind the subject and fill it in with white. You need to do this because we’ll be making the original portrait into a negative and using it as a mask, and we want the background to remain white. If you didn’t follow what I just said there’s no need to worry—it’s not necessary to understand channels or masks to use them to your advantage. You’ll see what I mean as you follow the steps. Even if you don’t, you’ll still end up with a totally cool-looking picture.
Now you can follow along at home:
click here to download the original picture.
PC Users - Right Click > Save Target As...
Mac Users - Control + Click > Download Link to Disk
Step 1) Negative reinforcement. If you’re starting with an image that’s black-and-white, you’re all set. If not, convert it. Contrast is your friend here, as all the darkest areas will become windows for the secondary image to peek through. Gray areas will be semi-opaque, and white ones inviolable. But don’t worry about getting your black- and-white version perfect—we’ll adjust the contrast later. When your black-and-white is set, go to Image > Adjustments > Invert to make it a negative.
Step 2) Create your canvas. We want our background image to match the size of our original. Type this series of keystrokes: Control + A to select all, Ctrl + C to copy and Ctrl + N to create a new document, which Photoshop will automatically make the same size as the clipboard. (Note to Mac users: each time I say hit Control, hit Command instead.) Make sure the Background Contents are White and click OK.
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