This chalk effect can be used for all kinds of pictures – fake children drawings in summer, blackboard writing, etc. – but the reason I taught myself this effect was because I needed a chalk person outline for my book Crimson Smile’s cover.
Luckily, whether you’re using it for faux murder or something a little more PG, the steps are exactly the same!
Today I’ll be showing you how to do the effect with the murder outline, just because it’s the first way I learned, and I think it’s cooler than the other uses, but rest assured: I’ll show the more everyday use examples at the end of this tutorial.
Step 1
You’ll want to have a background image for this effect, so go through your library of royalty free images, or if you don’t have any saved, check out Pixabay or Pexels to download some. Today, since I’ve decided to keep the murder theme, I’ve chosen a night time road.
I’ve also changed it’s name from the default Layer 1 to Background, just to help keep things straight.
Once you have the Background picture, you’ll also need the person to apply the effect to. The simplest way to do this, is to find a silhouette picture of a person laying down (preferably, with their limbs out) and then outline and erase the inside. (Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to do that)
If you want to do it the long way, pick any picture of a person you want to use, and then manually erase all of them until just an outline of a person is left, and then dye the outline black.
All that’s left to do now is to erase the background of the person image (if your picture has one) and re-size the image to a more appropriate size, so it fits into your background image. You can also rotate the picture if needed.
Step 2
To get my person picture as just an outline, I’m actually going to use the Outer Glow technique, so go ahead and read through that tutorial if you need to. If you don’t, go ahead and skip to Step 3.
For this instance, instead of making the outline ‘glow’, I’m going to keep it a solid colour – I chose red for now, so you can see which part this step is – and keep the Opacity at 100%. I’m also going to change the Spread and Size values.
You can go ahead and play with these until you’re happy with your own outline.
Once you’re happy with the outline, all you need to do is go to the Eraser tool and use the Magic Eraser, then click on the inside of your person, to erase the inside, and just leave the outline.
After this, I also just changed my outline colour from red to black. You guys shouldn’t need to do this, unless you for some reason also made your outlines a bright colour.
Step 3
Okay, now that we’re set up, we can actually begin on the Chalk Effect!
To start, you’ll want to go up to the Filter tab in the top menu, then find Stylize in the drop-down and then click Find Edges.
If it doesn’t look like anything happened, don’t worry! You probably won’t be able to see this step because of the black colour, but it’ll become evident if we did it right during the next few steps.
Step 4
Next, we’re going to find Image in the top menu, and then go down to Adjustments, and click on the Invert option from the drop-down.
Then we’re going to go back up to Image – Adjustments and this time we’re going to click on the Desaturate option.
Step 5
Now we’re going to go back over to the Filter option in the top menu, and then click through to the Filter Gallery.
Welcome back to the Filter Gallery!
As you can see, the last time I was in here was for the Stained Glass tutorial.
Today, though, we’re going to find the Rough Pastels option – which is in the Artistic folder – and then put in these values:
Stroke Length: 0
Stroke Detail: 15
Texture: Canvas
Scaling: 60%
Relief: 13
Light: Bottom
Once you’ve done that, click the Okay button to apply the changes to your person. This will also close the Filter Gallery and bring you back to the main PHSH workspace.
If for some reason, like my Preview box, yours showed nothing, you should also be able to see the effect on your person outline.
Step 6
At this point, as I said, you should be able to see the effect on your person. If you cannot, as I didn’t, you may want to skip the Outer Glow step. This will depend on the picture you use.
The person silhouette I chose for the tutorial, didn’t need the Outer Glow step. But I didn’t realize that until this point in the tutorial.
After my Step 5 didn’t seem to work, I tried it again, without stopping to take the screenshots. This is something that has happened in a couple of past tutorials. Some of these effects require you to do them one right after another, not do one, wait, take a screenshot, switch tabs, save the picture, write down the step in an article, and then click back over.
It’s a tad annoying, but you learn more through trial and error, right?
Anyway, so after trying to do the effect again and it still didn’t work (despite not clicking away), I decided to try again, but this time I omitted the Outer Glow step. This is because I realized the Find Edges step can’t find any edges of the picture if we erase the picture and just leave the Glow outline.
PHSH doesn’t recognize the Glow effect as an outline of the person, so the other effects didn’t work.
Luckily, this was the only fix that was needed!
The below screenshots are the same exact sequence, just without the Glow to make the outline:
This turned the inside of the person white, and outlined them in black
This step as it implies, inverts the black and white of the step above, so now the outline is white
And hey, look at that, we have a preview now!
Okay, now we’re exactly where we should’ve been the first time around.
At this point, now we can safely use the Magic Erasure and erase the black part of our person.
Step 7
We’re pretty much done now, but if you think your chalk outline looks a little too… crispy white, especially against a darker background, you can go to the Blending Mode of the person layer and change it to something like Screen or Overlay. If this still doesn’t look quite right to you, you can also slightly change the Opacity until it fits.
Once you’re happy with the Opacity, you can also slightly Warp the image, if you need to.
This is a little thing that can help give the effect just that little extra push into being believable. You want the chalk to look like it’s actually on the road. You might also find it helpful to zoom in for this step.
But same thing, this comes down to personal preference and what pictures you started with.
Once you’re happy with the way you’ve Warped the picture, you’re done! Don’t forget to save both a PHSH (.psd) file and picture file of the effect.
At this point, you can also start playing around with different looks to explore what else you can do with the chalk effect!
For example, if you combine this effect with the Rain effect and lower the Opacity of the chalk layer to around 20%, it can also give the illusion that the chalk is being washed away.
Or as I said at the top of the tutorial, you can use this effect to make much more than just murder outlines!
Like… blackboard drawings!
Or blackboard writing!
Or….
Like this article? Check out the rest of the PHSH Tutorial series here!