In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to look at a way to give a photo a more "ghostly" appearance.
I'm a fan of horror films, but I admit I'm a bit shallow in that I usually just watch them for the special effects. I'm usually sitting there thinking to myself, "I wonder how they did that". So while playing around in Photoshop one night, I came up with this little technique for taking a living, breathing person and making them appear more like a ghost, which is why I called it"ghosting an image". It's a simple effect with only a few steps involved and they're easy to do.
Of course, as with most photo effects, it helps if you start with the right type of image. A photo of your kids playing at the beach on a summer afternoon may not be the best choice. Then again, you never know till you try it.
Here's the photo I'll be starting with:
And here's the "ghosting" effect we're after:
Let's get started.
Step 1: Copy The Background Layer
As always, we never want to work directly on our Background layer, since it contains our original pixel information, so the first thing I'm going to do is copy it. I'm a big fan of naming layers and you should be too, so I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+J (Win) / Command+Option+J (Mac) to bring up the New Layer dialog box. I'm going to name my Background copy layer desaturated, and we'll see why in a moment:
This gives me a copy of my Background layer in the Layers palette, which Photoshop has named "desaturated":
Step 2: Desaturate The Background Copy Layer
With my "desaturated" layer selected in the Layers palette, I'm going to, you guessed it, desaturate it to remove all the colors. To do that, I'll use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U (Win) / Command+Shift+U (Mac). The image now appears black and white:
Photoshop Effects: After desaturating the layer, the image appears black and white.
Written By Steve Patterson
http://www.photoshopessentials.com
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