Tutorial - Make a chicken silhouette using Photoshop

Don't chicken silhouettes look awesome? And roosters with their distinctive tail make the images look amazing. I'll show you how you can make one of your own chicken using Photoshop (yes alas, I only know how through Photoshop) and a picture of your chicken.

First up, get Photoshop. I have a really, really, REALLY old version of Photoshop, which is great, as I don't have to pay for that subscription service that they offer now.

In Photoshop, you want to open a photo of your chicken. Choose a picture where they are standing sideways to you as this will make the silhouette more impressive. Here we have Penguin as our model.

Previously I tried to use the "magic wand" tool to "find" the outline of the chicken, but that only works if you have a clean background. Like, say, a nice clean white background. And unless you have a photo studio, most times your picture will be in a yard with a messy background.

The tool you want is the PEN tool, which looks like a fountain pen. Select it and at the top of the screen you want to make sure that the PATHS box is selected

 Once done, go back to your picture and start clicking around the outline. You may want to zoom in to get into the fiddly bits, the more you click, the more detail you get.

So keep clicking until you come around to the start again and close the shape. The dots will turn into blinking ants (well, that's what I think they look like anyway)

So this is what is called "Making a Path" in Photoshop, and now you have selected a Path in the shape of a chicken. You can now change the colour!

To do that look at the PATH box, which I keep in the bottom right of my screen. If you can't see it, it may be hidden under the Layers tab.

 What you want to click on is the dark circle at the bottom "Fill path with foreground colour"
When you do that, your image immediately changes colour. Normally black as that is the default. You can change the colour in the swatches tab or the colour tab. If you change the colour, you will have to click on the dark circle again to apply it.

Now, you want to be able to move your image to a clean canvas, so click on the dotted circle. The blinky ants should stop.

Now, when you selected the MOVE TOOL (the one that has the arrow head and cross cursor) you can move the picture to a new canvas.

 Just click and drag to the new canvas

 And there you go.

 

If you save the image as a JPEG or TIF, it will make a white background and will save your whole canvas. This can be annoying if say you want to add the silhouette to be within a circle. The square edges of the image will overlap the circle. I would always save it as a Photoshop document.

Anyway, I hope you like this.
I've been having trouble thinking of things to blog about and I've been getting into chicken crafty things over the Christmas break. Any ideas appreciated.

Oh, yes and don't forget to cuddle a chicken :)