Photoshop is by far the most widely used professional editing program for editors and photographers today. It’s even used for movie special effects, but it is its even more basic functions that make it so useful. For example, you can learn how to outline an image to draw the silhouette in Photoshop easily.
By contouring an image to draw its silhouette in Photoshop you make many editing options possible. For example, it helps you to cut out only the section you chose when outlining it and focus your editing only on it. It is also possible to change the color of the object and make other processes and changes only in this particular area that we outlined previously.
Photoshop can be much more useful if you begin to master some of the basic processes that go into making larger edits easier. For this reason, the selection or contouring tools, the clipping tool, text, drawing, and so on, should be essentially mastered by everyone.
How to contour an image to draw the silhouette in Photoshop easily
To begin, we advise you to activate the guidelines, margins and the ruler. That way, you will work with greater precision. Then, select the “Pen” tool, with its iconic and detectable pen symbol which is very easy to recognize. Now, along the entire area or zone that we want to contour, we will make points with the pen tool.
In this way, we will select what will be the area that we want to contour so that later we can work it freely. It should be noted that the preference of our «Pen» tool must be in «Selection» mode or in some versions of Photoshop in «Path».
To obtain the silhouette that we have just outlined, we must continue and finish the selection process. Let’s continue placing these points with the pen in line preference until we get back to the starting point, that is, to the first point placed. It is assumed that once you place the mouse with the tool over the first point you will see a circular symbol.
This will mean that it is now possible to create the contour that we want to enclose the digital image selection. We will right-click on this last and first point to reveal all the possible options and we will click «Make selection». After which a new range of options will open regarding the selection which you will have to edit or not according to your preferences.
How to cut out the image that we contour and take out its silhouette in Photoshop
There are two very common methods to achieve this, one simpler than the other but with similar results. The first is simply to use the “Crop” tool, to crop the area that we have previously selected. It is enough to outline our area with any selection tool and apply the cropping tool on it. If the snipping tool is stuck, try to fix it and continue with the procedure.
What would be expected is that once we have completed this, the desired figure has already been cut, but if we cannot use the other method.
To comply with this method it is absolutely necessary to have already outlined and selected the entire area of the image that we want to cut out. And also, we must have the selection options open.
Enter the selection options that should have been opened after clicking the “Make a selection” option, in this section, we will edit the fading radius. It is best to increase it to the maximum so that only the area of the photo that we outline is visible.
After this, it only remains to copy and paste the image on another layer to complete the cropping effect. Thus, you will place the first image on top of the second to give a relationship effect.
Is Photoshop useful?
Photoshop is undoubtedly the most complete and standard editing program that we can get today. Although sometimes it can be difficult to know how to handle all its processes, it is rewarding to be able to use it and stand out in your editing work.