How to make a silhouette in Photoshop Step by step

In this article, I will show you a quick step-by-step guide on How to make a silhouette in Photoshop. If you want to become an all-rounded professional graphic designer, check out the full 10-part course on our tutorials page.

What is a Silhouette?

A silhouette is a dark shade or single-color outline of an image formed as an effect of light hitting the object from one side to form a shadow on the object.

Steps How to make a silhouette in Photoshop

1. The first step is to remove the background from the image and isolate the subject image. To do this you can upload the image to remove the background and then download a transparent PNG.
2. Go to the file then open in Photoshop to open the transparent background image downloaded.
3. Duplicate the layer with the image and hide the lower image.
4. Set your foreground color to black or the color you want the silhouette to be.
5. Click on the top layer with the control key held down. This will make a selection of the image.
6. Hit control then backspace to fill the selection with color
7. Go to image then mode and choose CMYK
8. Go to channels and shut off all channels to remain with black

How to make a silhouette in Photoshop

The first step is to remove the background from the image and isolate the subject image. To do this you can upload the image to remove the background then download a transparent PNG.

Go to the file then open in Photoshop to open the transparent background image downloaded. Duplicate the layer with the image and hide the lower image.

Set your foreground color to black or the color you want the silhouette to be. Click on the top layer with the control key held down. This will make a selection of the image. Hit control then backspace to fill the selection with color

Set the foreground color to black and the Control backspace to fill it with color. To send black to the back, hit X.

Go to image then mode and choose CMYK. Go to channels and shut off all channels to remain with black