Create a Stylized Silhouette Portrait in Photoshop

1. Create a Stylized Silhouette Portrait: My name is Khara Plicanic and I've been a design geek and professional photographer for over 20 years now and I've been teaching for nearly just as long with courses on everything from photography to Photoshop and InDesign to Illustrator. In this course, we'll take the beauty and elegance of traditional silhouette portraits created with paper and scissors and learn how to create a similar style in today's digital world using Photoshop. You'll learn how to select your subject and create their stylized silhouette. Personalizing it with things like jewelry and other accessories. Then we'll explore some ways to add a touch of fun and wincy to your silhouette with features like crown, birds, fairy wings, or banners that are great for adding text and I'll show you some of my favorite tricks for adding and styling portrait frames and texture rich backgrounds. Included in the course files, you'll find links to practice images along with a custom hair brush I created specifically for this course. There's also a PSD swipe file filled with drag-and-drop vector hairstyles and other bits and bobs. You can use to polish the profile of any silhouette. I'm talking multiple pony tails, different up dues, and even some luxurious eyelashes. This class is great for photographers and graphic designers looking for something new to offer for anyone who enjoys working in Photoshop. Really, for anyone and everyone who just loves pretty things and wants to create a unique image for someone special. I'll walk you through the process from the beginning, step-by-step so it's doable for adventurous Photoshop newbies, and if you're already somewhat familiar with Photoshop, you will still likely come away with plenty of new tricks. Your project for this course is to apply what you learn here to create silhouette portrait of your own. It could be a portrait for anyone including yourself. You can get as whimsical and imaginative as you want, or keep your design more elegant and traditional. When you're finished, in addition to your completed silhouette portrait, you'll have the skills and know-how to create portraits for anyone. Along with a solid command of Photoshop basics, and a bank of ideas and resources you can take with you into whatever learning adventure you decide to tackle next. I'm excited you're here and in the next video, we'll get you all set up and ready to hit the ground running. 2. Set Up: Before we jump in, let's take a minute to get everything set up. In the resources for this course, you'll find a couple of different files as well as some links. There is a bits and bobs, psd, and a ChoppyHair.abr file. You want to download those. You'll also find links to some practice images that are from Adobe stocks free collection. You can license those yourself using your Adobe ID. You can license them for free if you want to follow along. Otherwise, of course, you are welcome to use your own images. I've also included some links there to some of my favorite sources for free assets. Things like Vecteezy, Brusheezy, Adobe stocks, free collection and Unsplash. Later when we talk about some fun feature items, those are my go-to sources. One of the things that can be helpful in making these silhouettes is to load Photoshop's Legacy Shapes. Chances are you probably don't have yours loaded. Let's do that now. Under the Window menu, choose Shapes. In the Shapes panel, from the panel menu choose Legacy Shapes and More. Within this folder, there are a bunch of different shapes and we'll see how those can be helpful later. The last thing we'll do is install the free brush that I've included in the freebie resources for this course. To do that, we're going to press B for our brush tool. With the brush tool active, if we come into our control panel up here and yours may look different. That's okay. Go ahead and click whatever little preview you've got up here and then come over to this cogwheel. Click the cogwheel and choose Import Brushes. Then navigate to wherever you saved this file, ChoppyHair.abr and click Open. Now, if we scroll to the bottom, we'll see a folder called Choppy Hair. Inside is the choppy hair brush. We'll learn how to use this later. For now, just click away in an empty area to close the panel. We've installed the brush and loaded our legacy shapes. Join me in the next video and we will get started making our first silhouette. 3. Selecting Your Subject: In this video, we're going to learn how to make a selection to create the actual silhouette. To do that, we're going to select one of our wizardry selection tool by pressing "W" on our keyboard, that will select one of these three tools over here and it doesn't really matter which one because they all come with this magical Select Subject button. Now when we click on this, Photoshop is going to use its fancy Sensei technology to make a selection and we can tell Photoshop if we want that selection and all that data to be processed on our local device or on the Cloud, and typically, you'll get best results if you choose on the Cloud, but you'll obviously need an Internet connection. I'll also point out that for the sake of recording, I have reduced the size of these images. If you license these yourself from Adobe Stock, they are massive, and just to make it a little bit easier to work with here on camera while I'm recording this, I have reduced their size. To get started, we'll click "Select Subject" and you can see we get marching ants around our subject. Now, obviously, the more contrast between your subject and the background, the better. If you're photographing your own kids or family or friends, you'd want to have them stand in front of a clear area. This looks pretty good. But before we move on, let's fine-tune it by choosing "Select and Mask". This takes us to the select and mask workspace and what you're seeing might look a little bit different than what I have over here on the right side. If you scroll all the way up to the top of this panel, next to view, we can choose different ways to view our selection, and in this case, the most helpful option is to view it in terms of black and white. We'll click to select that. That looks pretty good. The only things I'm not thrilled about are these soft areas. Traditional silhouettes were cut by hand with scissors and paper and you wouldn't have soft edges like this. To address that, over here on the right-hand side, if we scroll down a bit under global refinements, we'll see a slider for contrast and I'm going to drag that all the way to the right and then let Photoshop chew on that for a minute. Finally, we can see that some of the edges are a bit jaggy, so I'm going to take the smooth slider and drag that far to the right as well, and then Photoshop cleans that up pretty nicely. Finally, down here where it says output to, let's select "New Layer" and then click "Okay". Now we should see whatever image you have, you'll have the background here. It will be hidden and then we will have our selected subject on a layer of its own. Now for the silhouette part. There's a thousand different ways we could do this, but let's just keep it simple. Let's lock the transparency of this layer by clicking this button right here at the top of the layers panel. This means we can only paint on existing pixels. We can't add anything else outside of that. Now we can choose "Edit", "Fill". Here under Contents, choose "Black" and click "Okay". Let's take a look at another example. Here we have another image with a bit of a different hairstyle. Let's see how this works. We're going to do the same thing with one of our wizard-like selection tools active. We'll come up here and choose "Select Subject''. Then let's preview it by choosing "Select and Mask". You can see we have little soft areas here. So again, I'm going to crank up the contrast, and if you're working with a really high-resolution image, you may have to wait a second before you see it process. It can be pretty slow. These images, if you license things from Adobe Stock or you downloaded from Unsplash, they're typically really large files, so just practice patience. Then let's smooth this out. Drag the slider and again, we wait a minute, and that looks pretty good. Output to, let's choose ''New Layer'' and click ''Okay''. We'll lock the transparency again by clicking over here in the layers panel and then we'll choose "Edit'', "Fill" with black, and "Okay". One more example, we'll come over here and again, select "Subject", "Select and Mask", "Boost the Contrast", and "Smooth". Awesome "Output To", "New Layer", "Okay", Again, lock transparency, and again, "Edit", "Fill" with black. That's the basic process. Obviously, some selections might be a little bit trickier than others, and making selections could be a whole course of its own. Ultimately, we can alter the image very easily even after making a not so great selection, and one of the areas that probably ends up needing the most attention is your subject's hair. Join me in the next video and I'll show you some tips for making it look great. 4. Touching Up Your Silhouette: In the last video, we learned how to create our initial silhouettes. In this video, I'm going to show you some techniques for cleaning them up or reshaping the hair a little bit and I think you'll be surprised how easy it is. The first step is, let's duplicate this original silhouette layer by pressing "Command or Control" and the letter J to jump a copy up here in our layers panel and the great thing is this copy is not locked the same way this one was so it's easy to work with and we're going to maintain this one in case we really make a mess of things and we want to go back to where we started from. But to avoid confusion, we want to make sure we turn off the visibility of our original silhouette by clicking right here to remove the little visibility icon. Typically the areas that end up needing the most attention is the hair. I'm going to zoom in on the hair up here by pressing Command or Control and the space bar. I'm going to hold that down and you'll notice that gives you the Zoom tool as long as you hold Command or Control Spacebar. Now if I want to zoom in on the hair, I'm just going to drag across it like that. Now we can see that we still have some of these gray areas and I don't want any of that so you'll be surprised how easy this is to adjust. We're going to use our brush tool so you're going to press B for brush. If we come up here in the Control panel, we can see our brush preset or preview right here and yours might be different than mine that's okay. If we click on this, we can select from different brushes. We should all have just a hard round brush that's all we want right now. Nothing fancy, hard round brush and we can change the size of our brush using the left or right bracket keys on our keyboard. Those are the two brackets next to the letter P for perfect. Left bracket makes your brush smaller, right bracket key makes it bigger. I'm going to hit the left bracket a few times. Now with this round hard brush selected, we can see here that it's hard because it looks like a pepperoni and not a fuzzy pom. The number down here refers to the diameter of the brush. Another thing we want to pay attention to is over here where it says smoothing. This tells Photoshop how much help you want, smoothing out your lines. Now, if you're working with a tablet, like a Wacom, pen, or something like that maybe you need less smoothing, but I am working on my laptop with my index finger on the touchpad so I want all the smoothing I can get. I'm going to crank this up and I'm just going to come in here and I think you'll be surprised. You can just start painting and you'll notice that it's a little laggy. That's the smoothing factor happening. It's going to run a little behind you because it's calculating the smoothing. You want black paint, obviously. If you don't have it already, you can press the letter D on your keyboard to get your default colors. Or you can click this little icon right here, which will set your colors back to their default. Then you can just come in here and literally brush some new hair. If you want to add little more bits, you can just paint them in, some of that when we make the selections, we smoothed over some things and maybe we want to bring back some of that detail. But you can see that it's really forgiving and you don't have to be perfect. I'm just brushing in a little more detail. If the lagginess of that bothers you, then turn down the smoothness. That is just what happens when it's trying to give you nice smooth lines. To zoom back out press Command or Control and the Number 0. That looks great. Let's pop over and see another image here. Same thing we're going to duplicate the layer by pressing Command or Control J, and then hide the visibility of the original silhouette here. In this case, I'm going to make my brush quite a bit larger. I'm just going to give her a little bit more hair so you'd be surprised what you can get away with by just clicking with a round brush. Look at this. Just fill out that bun a little bit, maybe give her a bit of more hair up here upfront. We have a little bit of a line that separates the hairline from the forehead. If you want to smooth out any of these edges, you can just brush over it. You can also for example, if we look down here, if we wanted to smooth this area out, we could either paint from the inside and extend the area like this. Or if we switch to our eraser tool by pressing E for eraser, which is also a brush. We also want to check our same settings. We want to make sure we're at 100% hardness. If you click the preset here, you can choose 100% hardness. You can adjust the size using your same bracket keys and you can adjust the smoothing. In this case, because this is the eraser I want to erase maybe from the outside and just smooth those bumps. Again, I'm just working on my little touchpad. But because we have the smoothing turned all the way up, I get great results even still. You can go around your image switching back and forth between the eraser and the brush tool by pressing B for brush or E for eraser. You'll know when you have by just checking your toolbar so B for brush, E for eraser. I'm just going to clean up this hairline a little bit, smooth it out and let's check this image here. This one looks pretty good, but let's review just for practice, let's press Command or Control J to make a copy of our silhouette and hide the original silhouette layer. We can zoom in by either pressing Command or Control Spacebar and dragging or you can press Command or Control and hit the plus key a few times. That's another way to zoom in. If we want to smooth this out, and same thing, maybe we want to create a little separation. That is how you clean up your image, whether you are smoothing out the hairline or the neckline. It's simple, just using a combination of a hard-edged brush or a hard-edged eraser with the smoothing value cranked up as needed. But what about ponytails? What about bangs? In my next video, we'll explore the bits and bobs resource file to take your hairstyles to the next level. 5. Adding a Ponytail: Here's where things get fun. For the sake of demonstration, I'm going to change this little girl's hair from this cute little Bob. We're going to give her a ponytail. To make that look right, we need to get rid of her hair. I'm going to grab my eraser tool and I'm just going to come in here and is this a good head shape? I don't know. Looks like an alien. [LAUGHTER] Let's fix that. I'll press B for brush and give her her bit of a better head shape. Doesn't have to be perfect because we're going to go get some bits and bobs. In the resources for this course, you will find a PSD file called bits and bobs and check this out. It is a layered PSD with hair bits and bobs and even a neck line bits and bobs and some other things. Let me show you how this works. Let's say we want to add this ponytail to our little girl. To auto select it without having to look through all this, you press V for the move tool and if you Command, or Control, click on it. It will activate over here in the layers panel. To do all that, you want to make sure you actually have auto select off by default because holding Command, or Control actually enables it. If you have this on and you hold Command, or Control, you'll disable it, which is really confusing. Turn off auto select and you want to have it set to layer not group. Then if you Command, or Control click on any of these, you will select it. Command, or Control click on this little ponytail right here and you're going to hold your mouse down, keep holding, holding, holding and you're working your mouse because you'll see the ponytail disappears, but I'm still holding my mouse, so I've still got it. You're watching your mouse cursor and you're going to come up to the tab for the image you want to drop it into and tab and then hold, keep holding your mouse. You'll see the image switch over then you can come in here and before you drop it, I like to tell people to hold the Shift key while you drop it. The reason for that is if you are new to Photoshop and you're not careful, you can end up dropping the object out in the pasteboard like this and then you won't see it. What Shifts does is it drops it in the middle of your image and then you can avoid that. Now, she has this cute little ponytail and what's really cool is I drew all of these with the pen tool so they are all vector shapes, which means you can scale this as big or small as you need to, and you don't have to worry about resolution. If you want to scale this, you're going to press Command, or Control T so just think Transform. If you want to transform this, you're going to press Command, or Control T and then you can drag from a corner to make it bigger, or drag inward to make it smaller. If you need to rotate it, maybe your subject has their head in some different position, or at a different angle, or they're looking down, or whatever. Then if you hover outside these corner points, you'll see this double-headed arrow. If you click and drag, that will allow you to rotate the object as needed. I'm going to make this maybe a little bigger. Once you're happy with your transformation, you just go ahead and press Enter, or Return. That will set the transformation. You can still use the move tool to move it around as needed. We can give her a way high up pony, or a lower pony is up to you. If we look at the bits and bobs, you'll see that there's a lot of different pony tails. There are some bigger hair, some curly hair, some wavy hair, some longer hair and just different shapes and you can layer all this stuff up too. We'll come back and do some more fun things here in a minute. But I just wanted to show you that. There may be cases where someone has a ponytail, but it's hard to really read in an image. Maybe it doesn't look like a ponytail, or it's not a good-looking ponytail. We can have some fun with this too. As you can see, just using that hard-edged brush and hard edged eraser, you can really just reshape someone's hair, or head, or whatever you need to do to create a silhouette that you are happy with. Join me in the next video and I'll show you some tricks for working with shorter, choppy hair. 6. Creating a Cowlick: In the last video we learned about bits and bobs and how you can use that file I created just for you to enhance your silhouettes. Now I wanted to show you some techniques for working with shorter, maybe choppier hair. Here I have a picture of a little boy, and if I zoom in, you can see that he's got very fuzzy, pointy, prickly hair here. What we're going to do is basically, we're stylizing this. We don't necessarily need the exact perfect hair silhouette, we need something that represents it. In this case, I'm working on a copy here like usual. I'm going to grab my brush tool by pressing "B", and I'm going to just brush right over all of this. Just smooth that out. Here we can see he's got these little wisps, so I'll switch to my eraser by pressing "E", and I'm just going to erase those. Remember I've got the smoothing turned on, so that is incredibly helpful. We've smoothed out this hair and we really lost some of the personality. You'll notice in the bits and bobs that I do have this little chunk that might be helpful for short hair or a little boys hair. But I'm going to show you how you make that because you also might want to just do it yourself. Here's how we're going to do that. We're going to use Photoshop's shape tools. They can be found on your toolbar. If you press the letter "U", you'll grab the Shape Tool Family, and if you click and hold on the "Shape Tool Family", you'll notice there's a lot of shapes. For this example, the one that we want is the ellipse tool. With the ellipse tool selected, you want to come up to the control panel and make sure that this option right here is set to shape. Then we want to choose our fill and stroke colors. This means that there is no stroke, so that's what we want here. We want the fill set to black. If you need to change either of these, you can just click on whichever one, select the color, in this case black, and click "Away" to close it. Here under Stroke, you can find the non swatch right here and click "Away" to close it. This is going to create a vector shape for us, and we're going to draw two ellipses, and we'll use the second one to change the shape of the first one. To do that up here in the control panel, if you're familiar with Illustrator, we have Photoshop's version of Illustrator's Pathfinder panel. This is our Pathfinder operations. What we want to do is choose Subtract Front Shape. Then, just somewhere off to the side here, we're going to click and hold "Shift" to draw out a circle and then let go. We've got the ellipse tool, we have Subtract Front Shape selected and then we hold "Shift" and click "Drag" to draw a circle. Now we're going to drag one more circle. Again, off to the side, we're going to click and drag, but this time we're not going to let go of our mouse or trackpad until we're in the sweet spot. Here's what that looks like. We're going to click and drag holding Shift, don't let go of your mouse or your trackpad or whatever. We're holding Shift, we're holding our mouse, track pad. Now, we need to move this, so we're going to add to Shift and to track pad or mouse. We're going to add the space bar, and you'll notice now we can position this and what we want to do is put it over the first one so that we get a crescent shape. Maybe something like here. Now watch, this is my sweet spot. Now I'm going to let go off my mouse and then my keyboard. You see what happened? Photoshop subtracted this second ellipse from the first one and now we have this black crescent shape. We also have this mess. To fix this mess, let's come up to our Pathfinder Operations and choose Merge Shape Components. It's going to give us this warning about turning this into a path, and we'll say yes. Now we have this little wedge, this little crescent, and its vector. What's cool is we can grab our move tool by pressing "V" for move, and now we can drag this over here. I'll transform it by pressing "Command or Control T", and if we scale this down and we can squish it, we can shape this however we want. We're not hurting anything. But we can make a little colic sticking up. There's one. Now I'm going to duplicate that layer. We'll jump a copy by pressing "Command" or Control J". I'm going to bring up Free Transform, Command or Control T. Now we have two of them, but this time I want to flip this the other direction. How do we do that? Well, with transform active, we put our cursor in here, and if you right-click or control-click or at a touch pad, I'm two-finger clicking, we get the sub menu. Down here we can choose Flip Horizontal and we can rotate this. Then we have this cute little cowlick, and maybe we put one more. Let's duplicate that one more Command or Control J and V for the move tool and do something like this. Now, these three little shapes make up this little cowlick and we can move it around on the head by selecting all three. In the Layers Panel I've got this one selected, and then I'm going to Shift click this bottom one. Top one selected, Shift-click the bottom, selects this whole series. Now I can move this around using my move tool, and if I press "Command or Control T", I can rotate the whole thing. We can put this wherever it needs to be and we can pull it in to make it very short, or maybe if long, maybe we make it bigger, but pull it in. You can see that that just adds a great little touch here. We could do the same thing in the front. Maybe we just pick one of these. Here's another tip, we can duplicate it on the fly using our move tool. I've got this one selected and I've got my move tool. Now if I hold down Alt or Option, you see we get this double arrow and now if I just drag, we get a copy. I'll press "Command or Control T" again. Let's see how do we want, and Enter to set it. Maybe we just want this here. You can also use your arrow keys to nudge these shapes. Maybe he's got a little bang happening here. I don't know. It depends on your person, and how their hair is. Keep in mind that these little cowlick pieces can be used for more than just cowlicks. If I grab one of these using my move tool and drag it into this image, and we scale it down using Command or Control T for that free transform and maybe we squish it a little bit, reshape it, here, this can end up being like a little wisps in the back of her hair here. Maybe we drag it up on top and maybe she's got a bit of a messy bun. You can play with this stuff however you need to to get the effect that you're going for. Don't limit yourself to just what I've shown you here. That's a look at how you can use the ellipse shape tool and Photoshop's subtract from front shape path operation to create this little crescent shape that is useful for so many things. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to use the brush I created from this shape to create a whole head full of short and choppy hair. 7. Working with Short and Choppy Hair: In the last video, we learned how to create these fun little curlic wisps using the Ellipse shape tool and Photoshop's pathfinder operations. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the brush I created using that shape to make it even easier to make choppy short hair. We want to make sure we're on a blank layer. By now you should have already downloaded and installed the brush pack. To get it with our brush tool active we'll just come up here. At the very bottom of our brush panel, you should see choppy hair, so we'll double-click to select it. The way this brush works is it's directional based on how you draw the stroke. It's always going to be facing the direction you're dragging. If I drag from left to right, the little wisps go this way and if I drag right to left, you see that they go back. You can control which way the hair is [LAUGHTER] going, so to speak, by changing the direction that you draw the stroke. I can position my brush here and I can just ever so gently drag to the front like that. I'm dragging left to right in this case. If I want to add some pieces down the back, I would drag from the top down so that they're facing downwards. I'm just going to drag ever so gently and there you have it. That simple crescent shape, turned into a brush to create a whole head full of short choppy hair. Now that we have a great looking silhouette, join me in the next video and I'll show you how we can create the nice line down here at the base of the neck. 8. Shaping the Neckline: Now that we have our silhouette ready, we are in a place where we can decide if we want to use the whole silhouette or maybe we just want the collarbone up. I which case we need to get rid of everything else. We want to make sure we're on the layer that actually contains the silhouette. The easiest way to do this is just going to be with that eraser brush and the smoothness all the way up to 100%. You could put any shape that you want in here. Traditionally it's a swoopy line that gives a hint of a shoulder. If we imagine a shoulder right here coming down like her arm maybe coming down like that, then here's one way we could do this. As we come down, we swoop up to that shoulder and then you come down like a neck line like that. That could be perfectly fine and then we just get rid of all of this. You can brush it away. You can press "M" for the marquee tool, and then you can just draw a box around it and press "Delete". Here we have another image and I'm just going to do the same thing. I'm just going to use my eraser brush with the smoothing set to 100. Of course, you can also use the pen tool but if you're new to the pen tool, I'm not going to be teaching it in this course because I wanted to just keep things simple for everyone even if you are new to this. Same thing here. I'm just going to use the eraser brush and I might make it a little smaller. I'm just going to create a whole different bus down here because we have the shoulders here and I want to turn this into just an upper, a traditional bust. I'm going to follow this line, maybe I'll zoom in. I'm going to follow this line from her neck down. Maybe something like this and maybe like that. That looks pretty good. You can keep all of this if you want, but if you don't, then just get rid of it. Another great way to get rid of all of this very easily is to press "L" for the lasso tool. You'll see there's three different Lasso tools. The one that I want in this case is just the regular Lasso tool. Just like it sounds, you click and drag to draw a lasso around something, so all the way around. I'm going to come back to the beginning, and then when I let go, I get a selection and I can just hit "Delete". If you have trouble with the neck, you can open up that bits and bobs file and you'll see that I have just a generic shoulder, neck, chest shape, and you can drag this in to whatever silhouette you're working with and adjust as needed. Hopefully that helps you out. We'll do one more here. If you're ever trying to erase and nothing is happening, you want to check your layers panel. In this case, I can erase because I'm on a layer that's black, so I can get rid of that. You got to be on the layer that you want to erase and you won't be able to erase the shapes. The eraser is a pixel based tool, so it only works with pixels. You can delete the shapes and you can reshape the shapes but you can't erase the same way. If you're familiar with Photoshop you can go ahead and use a mask that would work as well. But we're going to not get into masks here. Let's do one more here with this little guy. Maybe instead of coming from the front and going up, we'll start here and I can see the neck line of his shirt. Maybe I'll just roll with that. I'm going to come right down here and just up and swoop. I mean, really any shape goes, you can even just go straight across if you want, or maybe we make this a little more dramatic. Sometimes people really like a big front, maybe like that. So fun, isn't it? Then I'm going to switch to my Lasso tool, so I'm pressing "L" and I'll just draw a bagel lasso and hit "Delete". Then to get rid of your selection, you're going to press "Command" or "Control" "D", or you can come up to the select menu and choose deselect. Now that we have several bust shapes to work with, in the next video we're going to create a new document that will become our finished piece. 9. Creating a New Document: We've got our bus, we've cleaned up our hair, we've carved out the neck line, if that's something we want to do, don't have to. Now we're going to create a new document to put our final artwork in. We'll come up to File and choose "New". You can enter whatever size you want here. I'm just going to go to Photo and I'm going to choose 5 by 7 and over here I'm going to make it vertical. Under Photo, that's a preset, and then over here you can switch it between horizontal or vertical. That's going to be 5 by 7 inches with 300 pixels per inch on a white background, and I'll click "Create". Now all we need to do is put our silhouette in here. Let's start with this one here. This one is all on one layer, so we don't have to drag and drop, we could copy and paste. I'm going to press Command or Control A. That puts a selection around the whole document. We'll copy it, Command or Control C. Now if I come over to this document, I can paste, Command or Control V. Then we can use the move tool to move it around. Now this is not a vector shape, so if we want to scale it, we can press Command or Control T and we can scale it. It's not vector, but as long as you're not trying to make it fit on a bus, I think we have a little bit of leeway here because we're not worried about photographic detail. These are just pixels filled with black. We can scale a little bit if we need to. Remember that this is a silhouette I created from an image that I downsized from the original, just to make it easier while I'm recording. But in real life, you would work with as many pixels as you can and you can always downsize later. The short of it is, it's better to bring in a silhouette that's far too big than it is to have one that's teeny-tiny. Here we have one silhouette. Let's actually create another new document. I'll press "Command" or "Control N", and again, I'll hit "Photo" 5 by 7 vertical create. This time we'll bring in this silhouette. Now here, we see in our layers panel that we've got two separate layers. If I want to drag and drop, I need to select both layers so I can command or control click so that I have both of these layers selected. Then I can use my Move tool and I can drag and drop, or if I want to copy and paste, then we can press Command or Control A to put a selection around everything. But we want to copy the contents of both layers. Instead of just Command or Control C to copy, we want to choose Copy Merged, so Shift Command C or Shift Control C on a PC. Now it will copy this as if it was on one layer. Now we can come back over here and Command or Control V to paste and let's do one more just for fun, so we can practice and let's get our little boy here. He's got multiple layers, so same thing. I can either select all these layers. In this case, with the bottom selected, I can Shift click up here and I will select the whole string of layers and I can drag and drop. Or if I press Command or Control A, select All, and then Command or Control Shift C to copy as if this was one layer. You'll notice I took out his short choppy hair because I like this better. [LAUGHTER] But to each their own. Then we'll come over here and paste it in. Now this one is big, so we'll scale it down by transforming it with free transform Command or Control T and about something like this. Remember, anytime you transform, you have to commit your transformation by pressing Enter or Return. These are looking so great, and in the next video, I'm going to show you how to add eyelashes. 10. Adding Some Lovely Lashes: Here we've got three different silhouettes, and we're going to add eyelashes to them because it makes a huge difference. There's a number of ways we can do this. One is in the Bits & Bobs file, you'll notice right here that I have a lashes layer. Again, as long as you have that move tool, V for move tool, for move of a V, you can Command or Control click, and that will select that layer. This is called lashes one. I'm just going to drag and drop it into my first silhouette up here. Whenever we do this, use the move tool and you click and you drag and you don't worry about the eyelash. You look at your mouse cursor and you keep holding your button. Pause on the tab at the top. It'll switch scenes. I'm still holding my trackpad. Then when you drop, you get your eyelash. In this case because we dragged and dropped, instead of copy and paste, we have the actual vector shape. Now we're going to bring this down, and those are some really big lashes. Let's scale them by pressing Command or Control T. I'm going to drag in and I'll zoom in so I can see Command or Control plus, plus, plus, and we can scooch these over. If you need to rotate them, we can do that too. There we go. Now, we have some eyelashes. Now, for here, we may not want to give her quite the same big lashes. Let's go back to Bits & Bobs. Right here we have a more simple eyelash. I'm going to Command or Control click on this one. Same thing, click and drag, hovering up here, still holding my mouse, bringing it down here. Remember, if we add shift, then we'll drop it in the center of our document. Just because we can't see, it doesn't mean it's not here. We know it's here because in the layers panel we see it and we don't see it here because it's on top of silhouettes. We have a black eyelash on top of a black silhouette. Of course we can't see it. Now this is going the other direction, so we want to flip this over. The way that we flip things is we transform them, so again, Command or Control T. Because this is a special transformation, zoom in so we can get in there, you're going to Right-click or Control click inside the transformation box because we're going to go from just a regular transformation into a flip horizontal transformation. We press Command or Control T to get the free transform. Right-click or Control click and choose Flip Horizontal. Now we can drag this down and we got to scale that down quite a bit. This is really what they look like. If you've ever had your silhouette made by one of the silhouette artists at Disney World, for example, this is literally what they do for your eyelashes. They cut out a little piece just like that. You'll notice that this is going to work great for our little boy too. Same with my move tool, I'm going to click and drag and drop in here, and you can see he has a bit of a lash that shows up, but we're going to just add a little more with that. Again, if we want to rotate it, we can do that too. You can use the Arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge it up or down or in or out to get it in just the right spot. If you somehow lost your Bits & Bobs and you're all distraught, remember, you can draw your own little shape like one of these wedges. This could also work for an eyelash. Or if we go to our toolbar and you press U for the shape tools, if you click and hold over here you'll notice the custom shape tool. If you release to select that one and you come up to the control panel, and yours will look different right here, but if you click this Drop-down, you're going to have these folders and you're going to have one, or in my case, two of the legacy shapes and more folder. If we twirl that open, we'll see two more folders and if we open up All Legacy Default Shapes, and we come down here to Artistic Textures. Look at that. There are these things right here that are basically [LAUGHTER] an eyelash or one of those little wisps of hair. You can select any of these. This look like an eyelash. We'll just click this and then we can click and drag with it. It's almost the same exact thing. We can repeat Command or Control T. Then you would right-click or Control click Flip Horizontal, and we could use this instead. That one's got a little more curve there. Now that's a more curly lash. Maybe we rotate it. Even if you lost your Bits & Bobs file, you are not out of luck. Isn't a so fun. I could play with these all day. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to take this up another level by adding some jewelry and even some headwear. 11. Accessorizing with Jewelry and More: Here I have another document that I created. This is the silhouette that we did together earlier, where I made her band a little bit bigger. In this video, I'm going to show you how we can have some fun, adding jewelry, and other fun things to our piece. Let's start by giving her an earring. Now, the fun thing about the jewelry, or anything really that we add is, it ends up being a negative shape. We're actually going to create a shape and fill it with white, but it's going to operate almost like a hole in the silhouette. Let's say we want to give her a little pendant earring. Let's press "U" for our shape tool family, and let's go back to that ellipse tool and we can change the color of our fill here by coming up to the control panel. With that shape tool selected, right now I've got the fill set to black, and the stroke is set to none. I'm going to leave the stroke set to none, but let's change the fill to white. It's important that we do that without another shape layer selected, because otherwise it will change the color of that shape layer. If that ever happens to you, you can click away in the layers panel to deselect and then choose your color. I'm going to make a new blank layer. We'll click down here at the bottom of the layers panel. We've got a white fill, no stroke, and I'm going to hold shift, and I'm just going to draw a circle, like that and I'm going to zoom in on it. That's cool. It looks like a pearl. If I press "Return" or "Enter", it's a nice little pearl. But if we wanted a teardrop pendant, then we need to actually manipulate the circle to do that. The way that we manipulate the points of this path, is we use these two tools. We have the path selection tool, the black arrow and this white one. In this case, because we only want to manipulate one point along the path, we need the white arrow here, direct selection tool, because this allows us to directly edit individual points. With that tool selected, we're going to come over here and just click. You'll notice that when we do that, we see the circle around this shape has four points; 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then it has little handles here, which control the curves. All we're going to do, is click to select this topmost curve, and then if you press the Up arrow Key, Photoshop is going to yell at you and say, " Hey, you're turning this live shape into a regular path. Are you sure?" Yes. Now, we can just hit the up arrow on our keyboard, and we can pull this into a little teardrop shape. When zoom out, we see, that looks nice. When we're happy with this, we'll just click away to deselect it, and her ear is not this high, so we need to move this down. To switch to the Move tool, we press "V" for move, and drag this. I don't know where's her ear. Here? That's probably about. There is a little earring. Another thing we can do that is super fun is a necklace. This is going to blow you away, because it's so simple. Let's make another new layer. Click the "New layer button", and we're going to grab our brush, B for brush, and we're going to go back to our hard round brush. If you still have our choppy hair brush, you want to click on the little preview up here, and then at the very top, we should have this hard round brush, and you can double-click to select that, and that will close the panel. We don't really care about smoothing, but I'll go ahead and turn it back up to a 100 percent, and I'm going to make my brush like the size of a pearl if we imagine either pearl necklace here, and I want to paint. We'll do this two ways, with white paint first. I'm going to flip flop my colors, so that white is the active one on top. That is as easy as pressing X on your keyboard, or you can click this little switcheroo button right here. That's its sole purpose in life, is to just flip flop these colors. Now we have white on top. But, rather than trying to be like dot, you can do that, but it would be frustrating to make all the dots the perfect amount of spacing. Check this out. With our brush active, we're going to choose Window, brush settings. In here, we're going to select brush tip shape from the menu on this left side. We want to make the spacing, we drag that out to the right, look what happened. We get perfect dots and we can put them close together like that. That's just the spacing slider right here. I'm going to have them so they are just barely touching. Now if I come in here, and I just click and drag, then I get perfect pearls. Now to space them evenly on her neck, after I've got it drawn here, I can use my move tool, and I can just move it like that, or rotate it, or what have you. That is one option. Another thing that's fun, if I hide this layer, we'll add one more. I'm going to switch back to black paint, so I'm pressing X to exchange my colors. I'll press B to get my brush tool again and I'm going to go back to my brush settings. I've got that panel over here. But if you don't see it, again, you can go under Window, and you can choose brush settings, or this little folder icon right here, this is a shortcut to that same panel. In this case, I'm going to stretch these out a little bit further, so there's actual space between them. Sometimes it's fun to just do something like that. Then maybe we even take this little earring, and I'm going to duplicate it by using my move tool, and the earring layer selected, and I'll hold Alt or Option, and I can make a copy, and we won't see it, because it's white. But, if we press "U" to get our shape tool, now we are able to choose a different fill right here. Maybe we have a little pendant here, something like that. Couple of other options. I didn't give her eyelashes. Let's get her some eyelashes. There we go. Very nice. Does not make such a difference? It's amazing. The other thing that I wanted to show you. Two more things. One is, we should put a flower in her hair. Guess what? If we press U for the shape tools, and you choose the custom shape tool, and we come back up here, and we've got all these shapes. I encourage you to play, and look through all of these, because there's so many neat things. But, there's also this folder with flowers. If we twirl that open, We can use any of these shapes right here. Maybe, let's do this one. I'm going to double-click to select that shape, and close the panel. I'll set the fill over here to white. We want to make sure that this is set to shape. Then I'm just going to click and drag. I'm holding Shift. That might just be a preference of mine, I'm not sure if you have to hold Shift or not. But, what you don't want is squished flower like this. If you're giving a squished flower, then hold Shift. If you're not, then don't worry about it. But let's see. We've got this flower here. Maybe it's in the back of her band, or up here at the front. When we let go, we have this fun little flower, and you'll notice that changed the color of her eyelash. Let me put that back. There we go. Gorgeous. Now, my favorite is over here, let's give her a head band. You can do this a number of ways. You can use the Pen tool. You can use the Polygonal Lasso tool. I'm going to use the Pen tool, because it gives us more flexibility, and this is really easy. Even if you're new to the Pen tool, you can do this. Select the Pen tool. You want to make sure that this says, shape, and we want to set the fill to white. But you see, because I'm on the eyelash layer, this is what happens now. Her eyelashes are white, so nope. First, put those back, and I'd have to click away so that nothing is selected. With the Pen tool active, now we can come up here and change this to white. If you have a shape layer active, then Photoshop just thinks you're trying to change it. Nothing selected in the layers panel, Pen tool, white fill. We're not going to draw any curves, so don't worry about curves. We're going to click to start a point, and then we'll click down here, and you don't even have to try to perfectly shape it to her head. But, we want it to be wider in the back so maybe we'll come up here. This is all just drawing straight lines and then we'll click here, and then we have to close the shape. We'll go back to this first point, and you'll notice when I hover, we get the little circle icon. That's letting us know we can click to close our shape. Now, we've got this shape closed. It extends past her head. We don't care, because it's white, but we would care if we put in another background here. I'm going to show you how we deal with this. In the layers panel, we want to take this headband layer, and we want to drag it down so it's directly above the silhouette layer. Then, we're going to tell Photoshop to clip the headband to the silhouette shape. That means, that the headband will only be visible wherever it overlaps with the head shape. To do this, the easiest way is you hold down Alt or Option. Then look, if you hover your cursor in this zone between the headband and the silhouette, you get this funky cursor. When you click, this shape will now be clipped to the silhouette. To really see what's happening, if I turn off the the white background, we can see, or better yet, let me just fill this with a color. Here we go. Here, we can see that the headband is clipped to the silhouette. If I unclip it by again just Option or Alt clicking between here, we can see this is how it normally is. We drew this shape, it's sitting on top of our silhouette. If we want it to conform to the shape of the silhouette, then rather than trying to manipulate it, we can just clip it by Alt or Option clicking in here. So you hold Alt or option, and when your cursor looks like this, then you click, and you can see that it just shrink wraps to the layer below. That means that this headband will only be seen anytime that it's on top of the silhouette layer. To clip or unclip, you hold Alt or Option, and click in the space between the two layers that you want to clip together. This is looking really cool. But, it's weird that it ends right here. In real-life, she'd probably have some hair coming over this. We're going to paint in a few more hair bits. But I don't want to paint it on the same layer as the silhouette. If I click to make a new layer, right now, it's going to put it here and also clip it to the silhouette. First, I'm going to click this layer just to get out of this situation. Then let's click to add a new blank layer. I'm going to press "B" for my brush. I'm just using my hard round brush. I'll use the Bracket key to make it small so it matches all these little hair bits, and then I'm just going to draw. You know what? This is [LAUGHTER], what you have to be careful of. I forgot we're still drawing this, because I didn't set our brush settings back. We just need to go back to our brush settings. I can click any number of places. I'll just come up here and click the shortcut. Remember, this is the brush tip shape category and spacing. I'm going to drag that all the way down to the left. Now, I can come in here, and draw a few more hair bits coming in front of this headband. I'm not sure how far we want to have them coming down. I'm thinking that I want this headband actually lower on her forehead. I'm going to select it in the layers panel, and press "Command" or "Control T", and I'm going to rotate it and scale it so it's a little more up on her forehead. There we go. Now I'll go back to this layer, and switch back to my brush tool. I can paint some more hair here, and we have more headband area to work with. If you look at it, and you're like, "I don't like it at all", you can press "Command" or "Control A" to select everything on that layer, hit "Delete" and try again. I'll deselect the selection, Command or Control D and B for brush, and we'll try again. Maybe I'll drag up all the way through there, maybe the key is to have some that go all the way through. There we go. I like that. There we go. This headband is now in her hair. Love it. The final touch on this piece is, I really want her to have a hoop earring. I love hoop earrings. Let's grab our Ellipse tool. That's U for the shape tool family. Then if you find it here on your toolbar, then you want the Ellipse tool. This time, we're going to set the fill to none and the stroke to white. Then we'll click away to close that. If we come down here and Shift drag, we're going to get a nice big circle. I'm holding Shift to make a perfect circle. Then when I let go, I can adjust the thickness of the outline or the stroke a couple of places. Over here, my Properties panel popped open, so I can do it right here, or I can come up here in the control panel and play with the slider here. Then the value that you choose here is going to depend on the resolution of your image. I'm going to try something like this, and I'll press my move tool to get off of that and now I can see how that looks. If I want to move it, so you've got to play with it. But, I love how that looks. But earrings, necklaces, head bands, and flowers are not the end of it. I'll give you some ideas for some extra features you can add for even more silhouette fun. 12. Fun with Feature Items: Here we have a silhouette of someone holding her hand out, and I have a picture of a bird. Using that same procedure of pressing "W" for our wizard-like selection tools and hitting "Select Subject", I can get a selection around the bird and we can choose, "Select and Mask" if we want to check it out. I'm not worried about the feet down here because I'm just going to take them off. But I will smooth this out and I'm going to output this to a new layer and click "OK". Lock the layer transparency and fill it with black. I'll grab my Move tool and click and drag to put it in over here. You can see it's far too big. Let's transform it, command or control T. We can put this sweet little bird right in her hand. If we want to take off the feet, we don't need to because they can just overlap like this. But if we wanted to, we just grab our eraser and we erase. It looks like they're erased. But if we bring him down, you'll see we basically just painted them white. The reason is because that transparency was locked. What happens is when you try to erase, when you're either on the background or a layer with a locked transparency, what's really happening is you're basically painting this background color. If we truly went to erase, I just need to get rid of this transparency lock by clicking right here. Now if we press "E" for eraser, we can buzz off the little feet and now they're actually gone. Now she's holding a cute little bird. How fun is that? Another thing that can be fun is a crown or a set of wings. These I got from Adobe Stocks Free collection, and they are Illustrator files. This one is Illustrator, this is an SVG, but by default they're going to open in Illustrator, which is great. But I don't even want to launch Illustrator right now. What I'll do instead is click on the AI file here. Because I'm in Bridge, this works, but if you're not in Bridge, I think you can still do this in your file browser. I'm going to right-click and choose open with photoshop. You might also be able to drag it and drop it down onto photoshop workspace. Because it's a vector file, when we bring it into Photoshop, Photoshop is going to rasterize it, which means turn it into pixels. We can tell it here how many pixels we want it to have. What you choose here will depend on what you need. I'm just going to type in1,800 pixels for the width and click "Okay". Now it's opening that file. It has rasterized the illustration. Now it's just pixels. You can see where we're going with this. We can use it as it is. Or if I want to paint this black, I'll just lock the transparency and then we'll fill it, edit, fill black. Now, we can go paste this in wherever we want. We can click and drag or we can press "Command" or "Control A" and because it's all on one layer, we can copy it like normal Command or Control C, and here I have that little girl without the ponytail, and I'll just paste it in Command or Control V. There it is. It's a little bit small in this case, which is fine. I can either rebring it in and rasterize it at a larger size or just work with it. Here you can see to make it fit, we can either tuck it down in the head like that or, if we want to keep it far out like this, we can also warp this. Within the transform box here, if we right click or control click, just like we did when we previously wanted to flip it. We can also choose Warp and then with Warp, we can take these pieces and just pull it, look at that. Just till it fits. Perfect. Now we have a crown, we have a bird, the other thing that we can try is a wing. This is that SVG file and by default, Illustrator wants to take this one. If I right click or control click and choose "Open With", you'll notice in Bridge anyway, on my system, it's not even giving me Photoshop as an option. But, if I take this thumbnail and I drag it to Photoshop and drop it, guess what? It's going to work. Just like the AI file, it's got to rasterize it. Here again, we can tell it what size we want to make this in pixels. Again, I'll just do like 1,800 or 2,000. We get this wing here. Let's select all, Command or Control A, Command or control C to copy. Then let's see where. [LAUGHTER] Who do we have still here that has a bird? Now we'll paste it in and Command or Control T to scale it down. Somebody can have a magical fairy wing. One other thing we can do is use our shape tool. If we press "U" for the shape tool family, and then you can either come over here and grab the custom shape tool or press and hold "Shift" and keep pressing you until you cycle all the way through to the custom shape tool. If you come up to the shapes up here and you look under legacy shapes and more. You come down to all legacy default shapes. You check out this folder here, banners and awards. You'll see this little ribbon. Here, if we grab this and we choose a fill and probably no stroke, then you can click and drag. I'm holding Shift to make it proportional. You could drag out a little banner and that'd be super fun to add some text too, for something fun like a birthday party. Now that we have some ideas for fun, extra features you can add crowns, birds, wings, banners, and all of that. In the next video, we'll take a look at how we add a frame to our scene. 13. Adding a Photo Frame: In this video, we're going to take a look at how to finish off our piece with a frame. Now you can find frames in a lot of different places, you can search for photos of frames at Unsplash, you can license photos or illustrations of frames from Adobe Stock, you can of course, take pictures of frames around your house. Any of those will work. Here, this is a JPEG from Adobe Stock, from their free collection. We've got two oval frames, and I think I'm going to use this one here on the right. The first thing I'm going to do is come to the Layers panel and click on that little lock to unlock that layer and that layer's transparency. Then I'm going to come over to my toolbar and I want specifically my magic wand tool. Up here in the control panel I want to make sure this option is selected. These are the modifying keys for how the selections behave, and this one lets us make a selection and then add to the selection with another selection. I'll leave the tolerance set to the default of 32, and over here, this one's really important, we want to make sure that we enable the option for contiguous. Then we can come in here and just click to select the white background, click again to select the inside of this frame and hit ''Delete''. Then we can de-select our selection by pressing ''Command'' or ''Control D.'' We've got two frames now, this one isn't really done being selected, but we're going to use this one. Let's select it by pressing M for the Marquee Tool and I specifically want the rectangle Marquee Tool. Then I'm just going to click and drag to select this area, copy, come over here and paste. We can see that it lands as a pretty small size and I did not resize this, so that is just the way it is coming from Adobe Stock. But considering that, we're probably just going to paint over it and fill it with a color. We're just using it more or less for a shape. I think we'll be okay. If that upsets you, you can either downsize the image that you're putting the frame into or find a different frame. I'm going to press "Command" or "Control T" and scale it to about that big and select our subject inside and shrink them a little bit so they fit. I think that even looks good by itself. But once we have our frame, we can either use it as it is or there are a few ways we can modify it. Some quick and easy ways to modify are to add a color overlay layer style. With that frame layer selected, come down to the Effects button and choose Color Overlay. What you see here is going to look different than mine depending on what your settings are. But basically, what you want to do is choose a color, so you click on the little swatch here and then maybe if we want like a blue, I'll drag this to the blue zone and then we can pick the shade of blue that we want, and we'll click "Okay". Then once you have a color, then you want to explore the blend modes because what you choose here is really going to change how this looks. You can see that the blend modes are broken up into little sections. Generally, these ones are going to darken things, these ones are going to lighten things, these are going to saturate and boost contrast, and [LAUGHTER] these ones are wacky, but they're fun to experiment with and then down here, this mostly affects color in different ways. Just play with these. I tend to find that for this stuff, Multiply is great, Color is great, Color Dodge, not-so-great. Anyway, you just really have to play. I'm going to choose Color, I guess for now, and click "Okay". Because this is a layer style, it's really easy to come back in here and edit it. If later we're like, maybe we wish that this was a different color, we can just double-click right here in the layers panel on the words Color Overlay and we can pop up here and we could choose pink or purple or whatever we want. I'm going to go ahead and cancel out because I do like that blue. The last thing that is nice when you're working with frames is to add a mat. Right now it looks like the inside of the frame is white, but that's just because it's on a white background. We know that the frame is actually transparent inside. If we want to add something else in here, the best way to do it is to grab our shape tool yet again, so U for the shape tool, and specifically, we want the ellipse tool. We want to make sure it's set to shape so we can choose a fill. Maybe I'll go with a fun green. I'm going to leave the stroke set to none. Then we'll just come in and draw a little shape, a little oval. I'm holding my mouse or trackpad down. If I want to reposition it, I can just add the space bar. Or you can just drag it and then reposition it afterwards, that works too. Once you have your oval, you can press ''Enter'' to get rid of the surrounding bounding box. We can either leave it here on top of the frame or drag it underneath. If you drag it underneath, which makes sense, you might realize your selection is possibly less than perfect. We can either go in and clean this up, or if you don't even want to spend time doing that, we can drag the oval back on top, and maybe we just scale it so that it sits on top in an even way. One of the final things that I like to do is add a bit of an inner shadow to the oval, except I want it to come from all the sides. Inner shadows are one directional only. Instead of an inner shadow, we're going to add an inner glow, but make it into a shadow. With that ellipse layer selected we'll come down to effects and I'm going to choose Inner Glow, and by default, it's going to be set to Screen and white because that's more how glows work. But I want to turn this into a shadow. I'm going to change it from Screen blend mode to Linear Burn and I'm going to change the color from white to this bottom-left corner, black, and now we can play with the opacity settings and the size here to adjust the shadow. I just wanted something a little subtle. Since I'm faking this oval being inside the frame by adding this little rim shadow, it really helps sell the illusion that this mat is actually behind the frame. We'll click "Okay" and we have a really great looking frame. If we wanted to tweak things more, we could add adjustment layers. If I click to select the frame and I want to maybe darken it, we can come down to the Adjustment Layer button and click and choose Levels. Because I did that with the frame layer selected, the levels adjustments can appear directly above it, which in this case doesn't change anything. But in some cases we might have some other layers below our frame, for example, if we had the mat below it, we wouldn't want the levels adjustment to impact the mat. What we can do to make this adjustment only impact the frame layer directly below is once the Properties panel pops open here, we can click this little button and that will clip it to affect only the frame. Then I could come in here and maybe darken it a little bit. I like that. Reduce some of those bright highlights, that looks really good. There you have it. Our silhouette has a frame and a custom mat. In the next video, we're going to bring it home by adding a background. 14. Finish with a Background and Texture: In the last video, we saw how to create this cool frame and matte look. Now we're going to add in a background. There's a lot of different ways we could do this. We could simply add a fill color. If we click to add an adjustment layer and we choose Solid Color, it's going to ask us for a color, and we could choose any color that we want. Maybe a fun purple color. Now, here it's covering up our frame because it's on top of it all. So if we drag this down below the frame, now we have just a solid purple fill color. Another option is to add in some texture or just a whole other image. Here from Adobe Stocks free collection, I have this wallpaper image. If we open this up, I'll just Select All, copy. Bring it back over here and paste and that looks cool too. And we can also play with the blend mode. With this layer selected, if we come up to the top of the layers panel where it's currently set to normal, we can click, and then if we just mouse over these we get to scroll through, Oh, my gosh, they're so pretty. We get to scroll through all the blend modes, I'm getting distracted and see which ones we like. I think for me I'm liking hard light a lot. There you have it. So be sure to experiment with loads of different backgrounds, fill colors, and blend modes. 15. Next Steps & Thank You!: I'm so glad you joined me for this course. We covered a lot. From selecting your subject and turning them into a silhouette all the way through customizing a frame and adding a background. I hope you come away from this course feeling great about everything you've learned, and I can't wait to see your silhouettes and how you put what you've learned here into practice. Along the way, don't hesitate to reach out anytime if you have questions or you just want to share a portrait that you're proud of. Please share your work here with all of us at Skillshare by posting your project right here in the project section for this course because in addition to the pride that you'll feel in sharing your work, you'll also be helping to inspire others and we all know the world needs all the good, happy inspiration it can get. If you share on social, be sure to tag me so I can cheer you on. I'm Khara Plicanic and you can find me my free creative toolkit for Photoshop and all my latest events and courses on my site. Thanks again for joining me and as always, happy photoshopping.