Photoshop Effects: Ghosting An Image

In this Adobe Photoshop Tutorial , We're going to look at a way to give a photo a more "ghostly" appearance. It's a simple effect with only a few steps involved and they're easy to do.

Here's the photo I'll be starting with:

And here's the "ghosting" effect we're after.

Let's get started.


Step 1: Copy the Background Layer
As always, we never want to work directly on our Background Layer, since it contains our original pixel information, so the first thing I'm going to do is copy it. I'm a gib fan of naming layers and you should be too, so I'm going to use background shortcut Ctrl+Alt+J (Win) / Command+Option+j (Mac) to bring up the New Layer dialog box. I'm going to name my Background copy layer desaturated , and we'll see why in a moment:

Photoshop Effects: Photoshop's New Layer dialog box. Namre your layer "desaturated".



This gives me a copy of my Background layer in the layer's palette, which Photoshop has named "desaturated".

Photoshop Effects: Photoshop's Layer palette now showing my Background layer and the copy above it.



Step 2: Desaturate The Background Copy Layer
With my "desaturated" layer silected in the layer's palette, I'm going, you guessed it, desaturated it to remove all the colors. To do that, I'll use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U (Win) / Command+Shift+U (Mac). The Image now appears black and white:

























Photoshop Effects: After desaturating the layer, the image appears black and white.