How to look famous in 5 easy steps

For those of you who don't know, I'm a marketing manager who specializes in graphics and web design. When I'm not blogging here, I'm working on some other website and actually getting paid for it.

The favorite part of my job is doing graphics work. We have 700+ Real Estate agents, and all of them want pictures that make them look like cover models for their business cards, marketing materials, and websites. So I've gotten pretty good at it.

And I thought I would pass some of that knowledge on to you. The first thing in making someone look famous is to find the worst picture you can of them. Preferrably one taken early in the morning before they have showered. I'll use me as an example. Here's one such flattering shot:

Since business cards almost exclusively use "head shots", we need to isolate the area of the picture we want, and then use the cropping tool to cut out the rest of the picture, like this:

Once you have your image cropped to the area you want, oftentimes you will need to adjust the lighting. People look better in brighter light, and furthermore lighter images appear better when printed on glossy paper and business cards so that is how we want to portray ourselves in these images. In this example I am going to up my lighting 50%.

The downside of adjusting the lighting is that you often lose contrast. But don't worry, I'll address that next. However, before we do that we need to lighten or eliminate the background. This way the final product ends up with a white matte behind the image. White mattes work well for most things, and it also makes it easy for us to add our own designer background at a later time. The most rudimentary (I just love the word "rudimentary") way to eliminate the background is to simply grab the white paintbrush from your pallet, widen the brush, and paint away. Below is an example that I haven't finished so you can clearly see what I'm doing. When you do this on your own, you'll need to be a bit more exact with the brush and get as close to the image as possible without painting over it.

From there, we can use move onto the special effects to give our images the final touches we are looking for. We can do lots of things here, including desaturating the image which will remove all color and leave us with a nice greyscale image that would work very well in many circumstances, especially if you only have a black and white printer.

The final steps are to return some contrast to the image. You can do that by upping the contrast slider in the contrast/brightness tool, and then moving on to the filters. Filters are found under the filter menu and allow you to add special effects to your images. One of my favorite filters is under the Stylize sub-menu, and it's called "Chalk and Charcoal." This one works wonders immediately, and when used properly can transform anyone into someone recognizable. Like this:

And that's it! See how easy that was? Try this on your own and let me know how it works out for you. Remember, don't get frustrated if it doesn't come out perfect the first time. I'm a professional with years of experience!