Photoshop is basically a photo manipulation, photo effect and photo treatment software that can make you do wonders with your photos in your desirable manner. The most interesting thing about Photoshop is that you can do so many things with so many ways with utter ease and bit of experties. In today’s tutorial of How to Create Action Highlight in Photoshop, we are going to learn a fraction of these expertise.
There are many cases in which a designer wants to highlight or super impose a certain action in a photo as compared to the rest of the photo. For such a task, you need to learn to make the image so that the background looks less important as compared to the certian action being highlighted. The following tutorial will help you achieve this with small easy step. Once you are successful in making an action highlight in Photoshop, do let us know and share your experience with others as well!
Open your selected image in Photoshop.
As you will change and manipulate the image to a great degree, it is suggested that you Duplicate the Background Layer in order to preserve the original image. You can do it on the layers panel by copying the Background layer or go to Layer > New > Layer via Copy and get your background image duplicated.
Now is the step to Select the part of image you want to highlight. Use the selection tool of your choice i.e. Lasso Tool, Pen Tool, etc. to draw a selection around the main subject of your photo. For a perfect professional selection, it is suggested to use the Pen Tool, however, it requires practice and expertise and so Lasso Tool will work as well.
Now Copy the selection on to a New Layer so you can work on it seperately from the image. Place the copied image layer above the other tw layers.
In this step we will add Stroke or outline to the seperated image. In order to do so, open the Layer Style box and select Stroke from its Styles option. Put the values in the Stroke box according to the following figure. Set the color of the Stroke to White (# ffffff).
By adding the Stroke, a white outline will be added around the selected figure.
Keep the Layer Style dialogue box open and apply another style to this layer. Add Outer Glow to the image subject according to the following image. The Outer Glow effect will give more prominence to your image subject.
In order to enhance the color of the main subject image, we will add a Hue and Saturation to the image. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/ Saturation.
Put the values in Adjustment panel according to the following image.
Now we will work on the Layer 1 which was duplicated from the Background Layer. Select the Layer 1 and go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set its value according to your requirement.
Once your desired Gaussian Blur is achieved, set the saturation of this layer according to the following image.
This is how it will look like after adjusting the Saturation.
Following image can show how your image will look as final product.
I hope that this tutorial has given you all the easy techniques reuired to achieve Action Highlight in Photoshop. Don’t forget to share your experience with us!
