How to make a black and white silhouette?

[katyblue04]

I've searched a while and can't find any help so here goes! Newbie here, just trying to take a few photos of my kids side profiles and turn the heads solid black with a white background. I am wondering if there is a quick way to fill in the entire head area with black, and the entire background with white. I've tried playing with the brightness and contrast, but still can't get it to do what I'm needing. Do I need to resort to using a paintbrush and going around the whole face/head? Even then, how would I fill in that entire area one color?

For reference, this is what I'm trying to do- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silhouette

But the photos I have to start with have busy colorful backgrounds, not just one plain color. I feel like this is a total nightmare, but there must be a way to do it, right?!?!

Any help is greatly appreciated! Once again, I'm new and have NO idea how any of this works, so dumb down your reply as much as possible! lol.

[Tarat]

Try "How to make iPod Ads"....Haven't tried this tut myself, but it may be similar to what you're wanting.

I did a few silhouette pieces a few years ago, and as I remember, I selected my person(that I wanted colored), switch to a new layer, and used "Paint bucket" to color that selection, then I inverted the selection(Ctrl+I) and filled that in with my other color. Delete the background layer(the one with the photo) and viola! One silhouette!

Good luck!!

[katyblue04]

Thanks! I'm figuring it out, slowly but surely!

[Tarat]

PDN doesn't have a very steep learning curve, luckily ^_^...To me, it was much simpler than Photoshop. just practice and play around with the tutorials and you can learn A LOT =)

Also, it may help to go to the Plugins section and get some of those. There's instructions on how to install the plugins. They are really helpful and add tons of new features to PDN, i.e. you can do more stuff much easier.

[W@@dy]

PDN is heavenly compared to Photoshop...

I tried it at school a while back. I couldn't even manage to select a solid colored image so I could blur the edges. That's ignoring the part where I gave up trying to select it and just tried blurring the whole image (which I was also unable to figure out).

The difference is like Mac and Windows to me lol.

[Tarat]

@ W@@dy True facts =) I've played with a copy of CS3 a friend has and prefer PDN...although, I do enjoing playing with their Flash program...lol