Stenciling a Picture on Photoshop

By: Brent Greenberg

Okay so this attempt at Photoshop was so much easier. I think it helps I picked an easier project with an easy to follow tutorial from Instructables where I turned a photo into a stencil. The picture they used was a headshot, but I decided to use a half body shot of someone from the Shootout for Soldiers event in California. A military vet playing catch with his stick. It's an awesome picture (that I didn't take) but am very grateful the Shootout for Soldiers team gives me access to thousands of pictures to choose from. 

To start, when uploading the picture, I had to elongate it as I messed up the dimensions of the picture before uploading it. Then I had to posterize the image to make it look a little rougher for the stencil. This gave the image a blurry background and actually looked pretty cool on its own.

With the image, I posterized it to level 10, which gave the background that initial blur. Then after that I adjusted the threshold. The threshold is what gives the image the black and white feel but it varies depending on how much threshold. The more the threshold, the darker the image. The less the threshold the lighter the image. The tutorial suggested to set the threshold to 100, but I felt it looked better at 140.

Lastly, I had to clean up the image to make it a little neater. With this I used the blur tool (yeah I know it’s weird), but it really worked. I used the Gaussian blur and set the pixels to four. This to me made the picture look the best and gave it a more clear facial structure with the stencil.

All in all, take two at Photoshop was definitely not as bad as take one. It was much smoother this time with a great tutorial and I definitely want to use the website again. And on the plus side, I didn’t curse at the computer this time. But let’s see how comfortable I am after take three.