This is an extremely simple tutorial that will give a pretty interesting touch to your photos and designs. What we are going to do is to give more depth to photos, in an almost 3D-ish way.

1 – First of all, we’ll get our image. I chose the following one from a Paris Hilton ad (click on images to enlarge):

2 – Now create a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N). Fill it with black. Adjust opacity to 45/50%.

3 – Using the lasso tool, loosely outline the figure trying to be quite away from the borders. (click below image to enlarge):

4 – Now go to Select > Feather and choose a value as you see fit. In this case, I chose 30px.

5 – With this new feathered selection, simply delete it and you’ll have a new image with great depth. Use a very soft brush to delete certain parts (I used it for the burger, small portions of hair and one of her bracelets)

6 – Done. If you want to go further, simply enhance the image. I used a very little airbrush and a level adjustment layer on top of everything and voilà! here’s the end result:

Alternatives

You may think this is all cool and dandy with dark backgrounds, but what with cleared backgrounds? The short easy answer is “cut the figure and apply it over a dark background”. But check another option you can do:

I took this beautiful hippie girl in a forest picture

and converted it into this:

How did I achieve this? I just did exactly the following I said before, only that this time the feathered layer has its blending mode set to overlay and opacity in 36%.

Experiment, try different settings and the may the force be with you!