Photoshop Tutorials: Create A Portrait Studio Background
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Written By Steve Patterson
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going learn how to quickly and easily create a simple photo studio background in Photoshop which can then be used to make any portrait-style photo look as if it was taken in an actual photo studio, even if it was really taken in your office, your kitchen, your neighbor's backyard, or basically any place other than a photo studio. As with most Photoshop effects, this background works best when used with the right type of photo, so since we're trying to make it appear as if the photo was taken in a portrait studio, it helps if the person in the photo is dressed nicely, hair in place, and sitting in one of those completely unnatural portrait studio poses.
One other thing to keep in mind before we begin... If you're planning on taking a photo to use with this background, try to have the person (or people) sit in front of a plain white background if possible when you take the shot, since that will make it much easier to select them in the original photo when you go to move them in front of this new background we're about to create.
Here's the image I'll be using for this Photoshop tutorial:
Obviously, this photo wasn't taken inside a studio, but here's how it will look when we're done:
Let's get started.
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Step 1: Create A New Photoshop Document Set To 72 Pixels/Inch
To begin, we need to create a new Photoshop document, so go up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choose New, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+N (Win) / Command+N (Mac). Either way brings up Photoshop's New Document dialog box. Let's use a standard size of 8x10 inches for our new document, so I'll select that from the list of Preset sizes. I also want to make sure that I enter 72 pixels/inch for my Resolution value:
Now, if you know anything about image resolution and print quality, you're probably wondering why I've set my resolution to only 72 pixels/inch, which is far lower than the professional print quality resolution of 300 pixels/inch, and you're most likely thinking that if we go to print this image at only 72 pixels/inch, it's going to look rather horrible, and you'd be right. There's no way we can print our image at such a low resolution and expect it to look good. Don't worry though, we won't be leaving it like this.
The reason we're starting off at only 72 pixels/inch is because we're going to be using Photoshop's Clouds filter to help us create our background, and the Clouds filter is resolution-dependent and only works well at low resolutions. If we tried to use the Clouds filter at 300 pixels/inch, we'd get a whole bunch of really small clouds instead of a few large ones, and we want the larger ones for this effect. I'll show you what I mean in just a moment. For now though, go ahead and create your new document by clicking OK in the top right corner of the dialog box.
Step 2: Fill The New Document With Black
We need our background to be black, so press the letter D on your keyboard to reset your Foreground and Background colors if needed, which sets black as your Foreground color (white becomes your Background color), and then use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Backspace (Win) / Option+Delete (Mac) to fill the document with black:
Step 3: Create A New Blank Layer
If we look in our Layers palette, we can see that we currently have only one layer, the Background layer. We need to add a new blank layer to the document, so click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette (it's the icon directly to the left of the trash bin):
Photoshop adds a new blank layer to the document, places it above the original Background layer, and names it "Layer 1":
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