How To Create a “Whitewash” Effect With Your Photographs

Written by: Daniel Richard

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How to create a “whitewash” effect with your photographs

This would be a tutorial-like followup to the previous post where I had created a calendar based photoset called the “31 Faces of October“.

Preview of 31 Faces of October

I’m quite a big fan of the PC vs Mac advertisements where the characters play out their roles infront of a totally white background - and I definitely wanted to recreate such an effect with some of my photographs, but without the expensive set up to that of a studio.

Here’s what I did to get the “whitewash” results that I wanted, from the very comfort of my own home.

By the way, I’m using an older version of Fireworks for this tutorial. Thankfully the terms are similar to most (or all) photo manipulation programs such as Photoshop or GIMP. I’d skip the “go to” and use the common terms to make this tutorial easy to digest.

Step 1: Location and strong light source

Choose a place where there is a strong light source. Best would be to have a top-down white light source from the top (eg: light bulb from the ceiling). The background have to be white or anything similar to the shade of near-white.

Look at the tiles behind me!

For mine, I chose to have it taken in… my washroom!

Why not? It had the best lighting available in my entire house. There’s a strong light source that’s concentrated in a small premise, with white colored tiles and a slightly off-white painted wall.

Step 2: Decrease saturation

Decreasing saturation to -32

Reason for doing this is to make the off-white background to be nearer to white, which will be tackled on in step 3.

Paler face and a whiter background

Don’t worry about the paler face now.

Step 3: Set auto levels

Set auto levels to get the natural colors wanted

This will enhance the colors to what we would want.

Enhanced color

Step 4: Brighten and increase contrast

Brightness +18, Contrast +23

I’ve set the brightness to 18, with a contrast at 23. This serves to make the background brighter, with the picture having a bolder color which will make the photograph turn out to be more natural.

Looking natural there!

Step 5: Trim out the background

The almighty polygon lasso tool!

This is when I’d use my favorite photo manipulation tool - the polygon lasso! It allows me to trace out the areas where I want to select by using the “follow the dots” method by clicking from point A to point B, and all the way around back to point A again to make the full selection.

Simply trace out the edges and delete them. After that, fill the empty areas with white.

Step 6: Blur out rough edges

This part is for users who may have some extra stuffs at the edges which are slightly harder to erase off. However, it’s actually pretty simple to do that without hurting the image.

My magic wand for all occasions!

Select the “magic wand” tool and start to click on the blank areas where you had worked on earlier.

The magic wand selects the entire area in just a click!

Pressing the “ctrl” key while clicking on the two spots helps to select both at the same time.

Feather out the edges.

I use the “feather” feature to blur out the edges. The values are up to you to decide though.

Step 7: A little touching up here and there

Gold colored prints. Sweet.

We’ve reached the last part of this tutorial. Actually nothing much for step 7 apart from letting you have the freewill to do any touching up of the image before publishing it up on the web.

I’ve given myself a more realistic tan, and turned the original colored t-shirt print from gray to gold. I had added some typography stuffs into the “31 Faces of October” images.

We’ve come to the end of this tutorial on creating a “whitewash” effect for photographs. Have fun making yours! :)

Hope you found this tutorial simple and easy for your needs. Subscribe to this blog now for the latest!