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Having your flowers silhouetted on a black background can be a very dramatic effect. It is also one that is quite popular as it really makes the details pop out at you. But who has time to make all of those detailed masks and selections? With this quick trick, you’ll be able to get this look in just a few simple steps using your adjustment layers. This tutorial also covers the use of layer masking, and is for versions CS3 or higher. Although this trick can be used on most any flower image, for this tutorial you’ll want to head on over to stock.xchng and download the "Daisy Summer" image for practice.

Once you have your flower image open, you will first need to add a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. Adjustment layers can be found at the bottom of your layers pallet. Look for the half black, half white circle icon next to the folder. (see below)

Now for this trick, it’s quickest to just use one of the presets available to you in the drop down menu at the top. What you are looking for is one that will give you a dark background, and a light flower in front. It will be different with each flower, so be sure to scroll though and see what one works best for your image. For the Daisy Summer image, the preset used is the "Black and White with Blue Filter" shown below.

Once you have your preset picked out, click OK. Now if you are using the Daisy Summer image, you will see that we will have some nice bright white petals, but the centers of our daisies are almost a full black and this will never do. So we’re going to add a mask to our Channel Mixer adjustment layer. If you look to the right of your Channel Mixer layer thumbnail, you will see a white box. This is a blank mask. All layer adjustments are automatically supplied with one once you apply them. All we need to add to our mask is a soft round paintbrush, set to a black paint color. Then, making sure you are clicked on your adjustment layer mask – just paint over the centers of your daisies until the yellow centers begin to show back through. If done right, you should see something like the image below.

Basically, a mask in Photoshop is just like a mask you would ware on your face. Some of the mask will show parts of your face, and some of the mask will hide parts of your face. In Photoshop, it works the same way. A mask will hide or show parts of a layer with black and white paint. Black will hide, white will show. But masking can often confuse and trip up a lot of people. So, if you find you are having a hard time with this part, please drop me a line in the comments and I will do my best to help you out.

Ok, right now our daisies are a bit stark due to the Channel Mixer adjustment, so we’re going to warm them back up. We will do this by adding a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer.

And setting it to the following settings (aka – a nice warm gold color like the one you see at the bottom of the screenshot below):

And then click OK. But now we don’t want to add more color to the centers of our daisies so we will want to repeat the mask we created above only now on the Hue & Saturation Adjustment Layer.

Ok, now comes the fun part. We are going to add a Curves Adjustment Layer to make everything fall into place. So, go to your adjustment layers and select Curves from the menu.

Working with curves can be quite easy as long as you remember that your shadows (or darks) are on the far left, midtones are in the middle, and highlights (or lights) are to the far right. Now we want a really dark background so we are going to create a curve that looks something like this:

This is going to make our background really dark and add some depth to our midtones that until now, were looking a little flat. You should now have an image that looks something like this:

But, we’re not done yet. If you look closely you’ll see that we have a spot of light in the upper right corner of our image. And that top daisy is looking a bit distracting. So, we’re going to take them both out by adding a new layer under our Curves adjustment layer and just paint over them with black paint.

That’s it. You should now have a beautiful daisy on a black background with minimal masking. Click the pic below to see a larger version.

To show that this trick can be used on more than just this photograph, I applied it to a photo of a rose. For the rose however, I used the "Black and White with Red Filter" preset for the Channel Mixer adjustment, and applied a rose color for the Hue & Saturation adjustment layer.

There you have it. Hope you all enjoyed this little trick and if you have any questions, let me know.