How To Create A Stencil In Photoshop

Hi, my name is Tom. I'm an Edit Assistant and a Graphic Designer, and I'm now going to show you how to make a stencil photo using Adobe Photoshop. Here, we can see this is YMA Edit and this is a stencil of a car.

I don't understand why I chose the car, just what my vehicle called me to use and this is the original image I used before. So I'm going to show you how to turn your images into usable stencils, not that myself or the owners of the Videojug would condone the use of making stencils and spraying them on walls for illegal purposes, I guess that's not in our hands. So, first of all, what I'm going to do is remove the white background of the car because we don't need that section there.

So to do that, I'm going to use the wand tool which can be found on the left hand side of the tool pallet. Now, this is a slightly lazy way of doing it but it's kind of a quicker way. So to select all of the white area, you click on the image and as you can see the wand area has selected all of the white and has made it very simple for me to just remove the white background.

So now we're going to make the very basic colors stand out in order to make the basis of our stencil. In order to do this, we're going to hit image, adjustment and threshold. If you change the settings of the threshold, you can make the white and the black lines stand out more definitely.

So again, this is all about interpretation of yourself and depends on the image that you are using, but for this one, I'm going to set it to roughly around about there or so. Now don't worry that the edges look a bit jagged, we're going to fix that in a minute or so. Now if you hit okay, you've got your own selection.

If you feel you want to change that, just go back to mode, adjustment and threshold, and you can continue to play around with the effect. Now as I said before, you may be able to see there are a couple of jagged lines around the edge which don't make it particularly easy to use or look nice. So what we're going to do is add a small blur to knock out some of that jaggedness.

To do that, we go to filter, blur and obviously don't go too overboard with it, but if we had a blur around 1.5 in this instance, maybe a bit lower, let's go with 1. You can see it's just taking off the edge there and makes it look a bit nicer.

So to make the black and the white shades a bit more striking, we're going to use the curve tool. The shortcut for this is control on a PC or apple on a Mac, and press the letter m, and this brings up the curves tool here. Now just by messing around with it, you can see it makes the blacks much, much deeper which makes your life a little bit easier in terms of the stencil.

So, I'm just going to make them as deep as possible. Hit okay and zoom out slightly. It's beginning to take shape.

So the last thing we need to do is go around and make the stencil a bit more usable. For example, we're going to remove this white sheen on the car windshield and neaten up a few bits here and there. In order to do that, select your brush tool, the shortcut for that is b on your keyboard or can be found here on the left hand side of your pallet.

It looks like a paintbrush. Change the size of the brush and hit okay. Make sure across the bottom that you have the right color, we're going to use black to get rid of the white sheen.

Then all you do is paint over the edges and the odd bits and pieces which will make your life easier. Again, if you need to, you can just shrink the size of the brush to get into all the nooks and crannies of the stencil. And there we have it.

That's how you make a stencil using Adobe Photoshop. .