Wedding Blog

I like to think that our wedding has special effects shots. We have been using a green screen to capture silhouettes of us and the members of our bridal party. It’s been really fun getting everyone to pose, and I like the idea of our decorations as more about the people close to us rather than just about me and my fiance.

We’ll be screen printing the resulting images on our invitations, stenciling them onto lanterns and incorporating them into our other decorations. The silhouettes are simple enough to lend them well to a variety of media. The other advantage is that with the right pose, silhouette figures can make anyone look good, even if they are making a funny face or wearing a stained shirt.

We used the following improvised green screen method to get our shots. First, we bought a roll of green paper from Staples (~$7 if I recall correctly) and temporarily attached it to our dining room wall with masking tape. We left a little on the floor to stand on so our entire figures, from head to toe, would be surrounded with an easy to remove color.

Next, I imported our digital photos into Photoshop and used the magic wand tool to select all of the green area. Using the brightness/contrast controls I turned the brightness all the way up until everything faded to white. Next, I inverted our selection and turned the brightness all the way down to deepen our color to black.

Somehow, reducing our pictures to just two colors makes us seem less like unkempt ninnies and more like sophisticated ninnies. Observe:

In another shot my parents hammed it up. Unfortunately, they were a little too far off the paper to use this image without a lot of headaches:

Our lanterns will be one of the most prominent uses of our silhouettes. I made a few for an art installation in February as a test:

Three more lanterns out of the twelve:

Stay tuned for our silhouette invitations and more silhouette decorations.