Right here we go lovelies! 

1. Okie dokie, first I’m going to find the cap of Olivia I want as the under-layer, so I chose this cap of Olivia  because I’m a sucker for ~random caps. We want the cap to be quite dark, or have a dark background, because it will stand out more in the silhouette effect. Colour it, add whatever layers you want (I have about 3489534 colouring layers and brightness/contrast layers. It’s shameful).

This is what I come out with. I want to add a bit of contrast to her face, so I place a white bursh tool on a new layer, and set it to Overlay, 100%, like this:




2. Right, with that done, I now want to start on my Peter/silhouette layer.
The important thing to remember here is, whatever’s black in the image will be see-through, whatever’s white will come out solid colour. With this in mind, I want to chose an image of Peter’s profile, preferably, that has a white background and black body. But, since that very rarely happens, you just have to get as close to that as possible. So, I chose this cap of Peter (both of the caps used are from black-celebration). I always hide the cap of Olivia first because otherwise it just distracts me, but obviously that’s optional.
Desaturate the cap (ctrl + alt + u).
With a white brush tool, 45px in size and 0% hardness, crate a new layer and “fill in” the background in white, like this:



It doesn’t matter if it’s messy. Set this layer to Overlay, 100%. You could also set it to Soft Light too, but most of the time Overlay tends to make the background more white. Duplicate that layer, do everything you can to make that background as white as possible, erase whatever needs erasing (like the black parts of the body) and finally, with a black brush, fill in the bits of the body on a new layer and set to Soft Light, 100%. I tend to erase bits of this layer that cover his face, so I can still see his features a bit, like this:

Underneath this layer, create a plain white-filled layer and merge that and the Peter layer together - this enable the entire background to be white, thus a solic colour for the next step.

3. Now set this layer to screen, you should get something like this:


As we can see, the top of the Olivia cap stops before it’s filled the cap of Peter, so I smudge the layer upwards just to fill it up. Then, with a new layer in between the Olivia and Peter layers, I use a black brush to outline the inside edges of the Peter cap, like this:

I do this, because the darker the edges of Olivia’s background, the more pronounced the silhouette will be. Set this layer to Soft Light, 100%



In this step, I’ve noticed that the colours on Olivia’s background are reds and yellows, so I use a Colour Balance layer on Peter’s desaturated one to higher the red and yellow midtones. This is optional, but I just think that it adds a bit more colour to it all.

4. I use a lasso tool, about 1px feathering, and just pick at parts of Olivia’s layer that I think could do with a bit of blurring (like this)

and apply a Gaussian blur/Box blur (whatever tickles your fancy) effect to it. I just go around and blur bits and pieces, just to clean it up and give it a softer effect:

And you’re done! Bob’s your uncle!

I understand that not all caps will come out like this, it will take a lot of messing around with for the first few times until you get the hang of it and can apply it to anything. But isn’t that what Photoshop is, all about experimentation? Experiment away my pretties! ♥

My ask box is always open if you’re finding things difficult and need some help sorry I’m a terrible teacher (or you want to show me the magic you’ve created, I’m always open to see that!)