If you’re like me– a bad, but prolific photographer– you’ve certainly ended up with many hideously backlit crappy photographs that you will never want to look at again and that make you regret your heavy index finger.  BUT before you go for the delete key, why don’t you try out this fun little photoshop project to repurpose your crappy photograph into something cool!

This tutorial is geared toward photoshop newbies and introduces some basic concepts in photoshop such as selecting a color range, layer styles (eg. overlay), rendering clouds, and basic chopping.  However, though it’s written for people who have never touched PS before, it should still be a fun project for PS pros.

One final note, this is written based on using photoshop 10 on mac osX leopard, but it will obviously be the same on a PC or with different versions of PS.  Also, if you don’t have Photoshop (good job on not being a software pirate) the open source photo editor GIMP should use pretty much the same processes as described below.

To get the cool animation you’ll need to be running OsX leopard OR have some sort of desktop wallpaper switching program available on your native OS.

Overview:
The end result of this will create a desktop wallpaper featuring a sillhouette in front of an ever-changing colored background.  It should look like this video.  The link is to youku which might be a little bit slow, but you should get the idea.  The end result will be much less grainy and a lot more fluid than what you see in the video.
Step 1: choose a photo
First you’ll need to find an appropriate crappy photograph.  A good one should have an obviously dark foreground and an obviously light background.  Technically an obviuously light foreground on dark background should work just the same, but you’ll reverse the next couple of steps.  For our tutorial, I chose this photo. Open it up in photoshop.

Step 2: resize it!

It’s important that you do any resizing right away to save you lots of work in the future.  You want it large enough to fit snuggly on your desktop, but not so large that it’s going to hog your harddrive.  Since we’re not printing it, I’d resize it to the width of your desktop.  I went with 1440 pixel width– the native width of my desktop.  To resize the photo go to image -> image size.  Make sure you have “constrain proportions” checked!

Step 3: Make the silhouette:

To make it a “pure” silhouette, choose Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold… Threshold is a simple but powerful feature.  It moves any “light” area to become pure white and any dark area to become pure black. The dialog box that comes up will allow you to adjust what is considered “light” and what is considered “dark” by photoshop.  Play around with this bar until you get something that looks smooth without jagged edges (though many of the jagged edges you see will be fixed once you click ok, and we’ll smooth it out more later) and without blotches of black or white where they should not be.  In other words, eyeball it.  Here’s what mine looked like.

Step 4: Seperate them layers!

Next we need to seperate the layers of our image so that we have the silhouette on a layer all by itself with a transparent background (instead of a white background).  There are many ways to do this: quick mask, pen tool, etc., but the easiest and fastest way in this case will be to select a color range.  The idea is that we want to select everything that is black, and then copy it to a new layer.  This is surprisingly easy to do given how complex our picture is.  Simply go to Select -> Color range.  That will give you an eyedropper to select your black.  Choose a black area, and click.  The preview image will show you what will be selected in white.   Again play with the fuzziness until it looks good and not too jaggedy and then click OK.  this should select the silhouette and exclude the white background.

Next we want to copy our silhouette to a new layer.  Go to Layer -> New -> Layer via Copy or just press “command - j” (ctrl-j on windows).  And bob’s your uncle.  You can click the little eyeball off next to the background layer to see that it is indeed the silhouette that you copied.

Step 5: Make the background interesting, pt. 1- setting up and ordering our layers

To make the background “interesting” we’re going to use two cheap photoshop tricks– the gradient tool and cloud rendering.  Begin by making two new layers.  You can go to layer -> new -> layer twice (clicking ok, each time) or by clicking the button indicated in the picture twice.  Easy as pie.  BUT WAIT!  Remember we want these to be the background, not on top of our silhouette, so move them underneath the silhouette layer in your layers pane by dragging them into place.  It should look like this.

Step 6: Make the background interesting pt. 2, working with gradients.

Now we’re going to apply a color gradient.  First choose the gradient tool from your left hand tool bar.  By default it is hidden underneath the paint bucket, so click and hold the paint bucket to get the option for gradients.  Select it.  Now we need to pay attention to a few things here.  First of all, you want to leave the “dark” part of your gradient the same all the time, so make the “background color” in the toolbar menu pure black.  Next, choose an arbitrary “light” color– in my case red– for your “foreground color”.  You will never change the black background, but you will change the color of the foreground color to make different gradients later on.

Next choose what style of gradient you want.  We want to use the same colors as what’s in the tool bar on the left, so choose the first option.  Finally, choose what type of gradient you want.  For mine, I chose a round gradient that moves from the light color in the center to the dark color on the outside.

Finally draw your gradient. Click in the center (or wherever you want to center your circular gradient) and then drag to the point where you want the gradient to end, for me this was slightly off the picture.

There you go!  You have a nice background!

Step 7: Making an interesting background pt. 3, clouding it up.

Well that’s all well and good, but this has been WAY too easy of a project!  Why don’t we tweak our background just a bit to give it a slightly more natural feel.  The problem: the gradient created by photoshop is just a bit too sterile.  Robotic.  Clean.  We want to give it a slightly more discombobulated feel by obscuring the colors just a bit.  Nothing too strong, but enough to just make it dirty enough to where the photoshopping isn’t AS noticeable.  We’re going to render some clouds to do this.

First, click on your completely empty layer.  It should be between your gradient layer and your silhouette layer.  Now choose Filter -> Render -> Clouds and OMFG WHAT HAPPENED TO MY PICTURE??? IT’S SO UGLY NOW. SHIT UNDO UNDO UNDO!

Calm down.

We just need to tone the clouds down a bit.  First of all, we’re going to change the layer style from normal to overlay (see picture below).  Clouds are rendered given your choice of color in your tool bar.  So if you have red and black, the red will be the “light” part of the clouds and the black will be the “dark” part of your clouds. When we change this setting to Overlay, instead of using these red and black colors, it will just overlay the darkness and lightness of the clouds, not the actual colors (this is a very poor explanation of what, exactly, overlay is, and I don’t really understand it, to be honest).  Next we’ll want to set the Opacity down to a pretty low setting so that we just get a hint of the “clouds” (see picture below).  In the end, what you see won’t really look like “clouds” as much as incongruity in the gradient that gets rid of that sterile, clean gradient that we had before.

Yeah… that’s lookin’ good!

Step 8 - OPTIONAL - Minor clean up

You’ve probably been viewing your picture in a reduced view (like 25% or 33% of actual size). Go ahead and kick it up to the real size by clicking View -> Actual pixels.  Look at your silhouette.  Is it jagged and pixelated?  If not, go to step 9.  If it is, you might consider smoothing out the edges just a bit.

There are many ways to smooth these edges, but the easiest way for us will be to give it a slight Gaussian Blur. Make sure to click on the layer with your silhouette– NOT THE CLOUD OR GRADIENT LAYER!  Go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur.  This blur is pretty powerful, so you only want to use a very light blur.  In my picture, I went with a .5 pixel blur.  But really, just eyeball it.   That number will change depending on the size of your picture and just how jagged it is.

Step 9 - Save everything!

First go to File -> save and save a copy of your separated photoshop file.  This will be a .psd file and only good for photoshop use.  But you might want to come back to it later to add more colors.

Now save the copy that will be used on your desktop by clicking File -> Save for Web & Devices. There’s lots of debate over which format is the best.  I won’t get into that, but I personally prefer .png files.  So if you want to follow my lead exactly, in the the Save for Web & Devices, choose png-24 from the presets list.

Make sure you save this in a new folder where you can easily find it again later.

Step 10 - Add new colors!

Now here comes the fun and easy part.  Back in photoshop, click on the layer that has your gradient in it (beneath the clouds and above the “background” that we actually never see anymore).  Click on your gradient tool again, and now choose a different foreground color.  Really experiment.  You’d be surprised what colors actually work here.  Light colors make it look like sunrise, dark colors can make it look apocolyptic.  It’s pretty hard to get it wrong.

Anyway, choose a new color, draw the gradient again, then choose Save for Web & Devices again with a different name.  Repeat this many times with lots of different colors– in other words you’re very quickly generating new pictures that are exactly the same except for the background gradient.  It doesn’t matter if the gradient began and ended in the same place– when these are animated later on, it will just look like the light is kind of moving around, and it actually looks better that way!

Do this with about 12 or 13 different colors– or, hell, however many you want.

Here’s are some examples:

Step 11 - Throw it on your desktop!

To get this animated on your desktop, you’ll need to be running osX leopard.  If you’re on windows, you can probably achieve this with a desktop wallpaper switcher program, just google it.  There are dozens.  But assuming you use OsX leopard this is very easy.  Go to your system preferences window, choose desktop and screensaver, and add a photo folder.  Choose the folder where you saved all the different pictures with different colors.

Next, tell it to change the picture every 5 seconds– you can choose random order if you like, but it’s unlikely you’ll be able to tell what order it’s going in if you have lots of pictures.

And voila!  You have a sweet, catchy desktop that is impressive and fun to watch.  The way OsX changes from picture to picture works magically on this so that the colors will fade from one to the other.  The only problem I have is that I’d like it to change the desktop a bit more frequently than every 5 seconds– like every 3 seconds or so– to make the changes more fluid, but nevertheless it’s a pretty sweet set up!

If you try this at home, let me know the results, or if my tutorial is clear. Especially if you’re new to photoshop. Did this help you figure out some of the features? If you’re a PS pro (I’m certainly not), was this pretty accurate? Are there easier or better ways to do this?  What else could improve it?