Wow now that is a fancy title for this simple process. This something that we have come up with for making the silhouetting process easier on our first-year photojournalism students.

The purpose of this little adventure was to be able to have our staff of 20 new photojournalism students (with limited photography skill/experience and limited Photoshop skill/experience) be able to create a spread in our student section of silhouetted portraits.

Before we started this adventure we had to identify the potential road-blocks.

Everyone wants to have a beautiful white studio to be able to take well-lit portraits. However, in most cases very few staffs have the money for the equipment, nor do they have the space to set it up.

Also, students have a difficult enough time pulling students aside to do interviews. We knew that to get photographers to bring the student or staff to the yearbook room would add even more variables to the problem.

Lastly we knew that the students were not experts in using the eraser tool in Photoshop, so we would have to make the background of the photographs as solid as possible.

Solution: white shower curtain $1.99 at your local retail store.

Students grabbed a curtain and some magnets (which some curtains have magnets built in) and a camera and placed the shower curtain on the metal lockers. They quickly snapped a few photos and then were on their way. They downloaded the photos to Photoshop and in most cases used the magic eraser to knock out the white background. This provided them with a transparent field behind their subject. They saved the photo as a .png file and placed the photo in the spread.