Basic (and Beyond) Photography – Silhouettes

by Mickey Rountree

At the March meeting I was showing someone a book on composition and a silhouette caught his eye and he asked how that was done. So here is the easy answer, and then some more advanced ideas to play with. BTW, as a kid, the word silhouette got me eliminated from a spelling bee, so now I pay attention to spelling it correctly.

When these articles are converted to PDF and sized for the newsletter, the resolution and quality of the images is seriously degraded. If you would like to read the article and see the images as I did, you can see this article on my website at this link.

https://mickeyrountree.smugmug.com/Articles/Basic-Photography-Series/

First here is a basic definition. A silhouette is a solid, dark outline of an object or person seen against a lighter background, showcasing the subject’s shape without internal details.

Photographically we would place a subject in front of a white or light background, light the background, but not the subject and we would have a silhouette.

Here is a simple setup with two lights on the background and no light on the subject, and the resulting silhouette image.

Here the silhouette isn’t pure black and white because the flowers were somewhat translucent. To fix that in Lightroom (or Camera Raw) increase contrast, increase whites and highlights, and decrease blacks and shadows.

A silhouette doesn’t have to be pure black and white. Here the horse and rider at sunrise were silhouetted against the sky. To emphasize the silhouette effect, I decreased blacks and increased highlights. I did increase shadows to add detail to the surf.

But what if you didn’t light and shoot the subject as a silhouette or you want to do something more creative? We’ll start with this image and turn it into a silhouette.

Open the image in Photoshop, and in the contextual menu click select subject.