Running Woman

In this tutorial you will learn how to transform a normal photo of a person to make it look like they are running. All illustrations and descriptions are provided throughout this tutorial, so you can easily follow the procedure.

You will start off by opening your photo which you will be working on. You can view the Figure1, which is a shot of the image I am starting off with.

Figure 1

Once you have opened your photo in Photoshop, we are ready to start. Ensure that you have the 'Layers' panel visible on your workspace. If the 'Layers' panel is not visible, you can make it visible by going to 'Window > Layers' *or by pressing 'F7' as a keyboard shortcut.

The first layer in the 'Layers' panel will be named 'Background' by default, and it contains the locked image/photo. Duplicate the layer TWICE by pressing 'Ctrl' + 'J' two times. Now delete the original layer which is locked, for we only need two layers to work with.

Rename the top layer as 'body' and the bottom layer as 'background'. No actively select the 'background' layer and press 'Ctrl' + 'Shift' + 'U' to make the 'background' layer black and white. The top layer will still be color though.

You will want to basically make everything on the photo black and white, except for the person/body. So, actively select the 'body' layer and start erasing everything around the body. This could be a time consuming process, since you have to carefully erase everything around the edges, without actually erasing parts of the body. Once you are done with this, you can view Figure2 below as an illustration to how your photo will look at this moment in time.

Figure 2

Make sure that you have the 'background' layer selected in the 'Layers' panel. We will now apply a 'Motion Blur' filter to the 'background' layer. You can do this by going to 'Filter > Blur > Motion Blur'. I have set the distance to 50pixels, though you should see what looks appropriate according to the size of your photo. Once you have finished this, you can view the result in Figure3.

Figure 3

There are two last things you need to do to complete your running person.

Firstly select the 'body' layer and apply the 'Wind' filter to the layer. You can do this by going to 'Filter > Stylize > Wind'. Set the wind from left to right.

Now select the 'Smudge Tool' which is situated on the 'Tools' panel. Lightly brush with a large brush from left to right on the edges of the body. This gives the body a blurry look, which makes it look like the person is running very fast.

You can view the finished result in Figure4.

Figure 4