We’ve all seen those photos that show a wonderfully intimate moment made even more magical by
an impossibly smooth, creamy background. It’s entirely possible that these types of images can be
created right out of the camera by wonderfully talented photographers with ungodly expensive lenses.
It’s also possible that it can be done by one of us mere mortals with a few clever techniques in Photoshop.
In this project we’ll show you how to accomplish that.ADD A MAGICAL CREAMY BACKGROUND
TO YOUR PHOTOS
KIRK NELSON
PHOTOSHOP DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS
This technique works best when the subject has a significant
backlighting that creates a natural rim lighting effect to
indicate the light direction. It’s important to follow that
light direction and not work against it, or the final effect
won’t look natural.
This project does use an Adobe stock image for the
instruction. If you don’t wish to purchase the image, feel
free to use the smaller water-marked image to learn the
technique and then apply what you learn to your own
images afterwards.STEP ONE: Open the image you want to use. We’re using
a shot of a beautiful bride and her maids. If you’d like to
download the low-res watermarked version of this image
to follow along, click this link, log in with your Adobe ID,
and click the Save to Library button. Double-click the
image in the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries) to open
it in Photoshop. To make it easier to work with the image,
increase the resolution of the practice file. (We normally
don’t recommend enlarging images, but this is only for
practice purposes.) Go to Image>Image Size, turn on