I did these silhouettes last week but this week I learned a nifty trick for editing them.
When I photographed these silhouettes we were on holidays on the beach. :-) And I might add it was the first time I'd taken silhouettes intentionally, I love manual mode!
I tried to pick a place with few distractions in the background. The sun sets behind the dunes but there are lots of trees and erosion so in most places the dunes are a sheer drop. There is one spot that the ground drops off behind the dunes and I could also stand on the beach side of the dune. Some of the other shots we took on the beach.
I manually exposed for the sky. I tried to direct their poses so that they were as clean and separate as possible. So they didn't look like black blobs.Then I focused on them.
In editing I increased the saturation and temperature until I got the colours that I liked. Then I moved the black slider in the histogram (adjustment layer-levels) till the silhouettes were black. But I actually learned a new trick this week that you can use the burn tool (as a layer, see my note below) to selectively colour in the silhouettes leaving the background untouched. This was a bit fiddly but with some images, like the one with the reflections on the beach it kept the image from becoming too dark.
My husband and I had a debate about the trolley photo. I thought the white insides of the trolley wheels were distracting, see the original
here, Day 7. But he thought darkening it made it look unnaturally dark, what do you think??
NB. Since originally posting this I received a comment (thank you) about the destructive nature of dodge and burn. See this
post about non-destructive dodge and burn as a layer, which is how I did it. I always work on a copy and 'save as' to protect my original too. Sorry about the confusion. There are also great free actions that do this layer for you, so you just paint on with black or white. See
here and
here.
Linking up with Click it up a Notch
Constructive Critiques welcome
