how to make a silhouette from a photo

Recently, I’ve been making silhouette cards and gifts, so I wanted to provide an easy tutorial on how to make a silhouette from a photo.

Silhouettes are a great way to add a personal touch to any crafting project. For example, I created silhouette cutouts of my kids to make cute ornament gifts for my parents.

Since you can make these outline templates from any picture, you can also use them to make more whimsical crafts as well. In the past, I’ve used mermaid silhouette SVGs to make fun birthday cards for my daughter.

I use a tool called Clipping Magic to make silhouette cutouts from pictures. Clipping Magic is the only fully automated background removal tool that allows you to make editorial changes after the background has been automatically removed. In this post, I’ll go through a tutorial on how to make a silhouette from a photo using Clipping Magic.

How to Make Silhouette Outlines from Pictures

Get Your Photograph

To start, I’m going to use this Public Domain photo of a couple as an example. I like these projects for how easily customizable they are, so I’d recommend using a personalized photo if you have one. These projects work great with profile portrait pictures. By getting the side view, it’s easier to tell who your subject is.

You can also use full body photos to capture the silhouettes as well. For example, you might use a photo of you and your significant other to make an anniversary or Valentine’s Day card. You can also take a photograph of you and your friends to make keychains, puzzles, and other personalized photo gift ideas.

Upload Photo To Clipping Magic

Next, you should upload your photo to clippingmagic.com. Usually, I just drag and drop my image from my Desktop, Documents, or Downloads. This will depend on where you store your image.

Edit Your Result

The tool automatically removes the background from the image. While many tools do this, Clipping Magic is the only one that allows you to make editorial changes after the automated background removal. Making this adjustment is important for silhouette art.

Sometimes, automatic background removing software could miss certain pixels that you need for the silhouette. For example, it can be tricky for the automation to pick up hair strains and complicated outlines. With Clipping Magic, you can make changes after it captures the automated selection.

Here, I’ve just added back in a little piece between the couple. To do this, you can zoom in to inspect the image result. Then, you can use the red minus tool to remove unwanted parts of the image. You can also use the green tool addition to bring back any lost pixels in the foreground. The scalpel tool also works well to smooth out jagged edges.

Download Your Image

Once your image looks the way you’d like, you can download it to your computer system.

The best part of clipping magic is you can download it in many different formats. I will be using this silhouette as part of a Cricut cutting machine project so I will download the SVG format version of the file. SVGs also work for Silhouette and other cutting machines as well.

Of course, you can cut it out by hand by printing the file as well. The whole process was so easy I went from photo to finished product in less than 5 minutes.

Use Your Silhouette For Your Project

If you are interested in this rose heart shape frame template, it is available for free in my resource library.

Follow these steps for how to make a how to make a silhouette from a photo using Clipping Magic.

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