Creating ghostly nude photographs using Photoshop should be relatively easy. It is if you have planned ahead. Setting the camera on a tripod and taking a photograph of the empty scene and then adding a nude model means that you can overlay the two images and then adjust the opacity to create your ghost.

That does not quite work. By adding more layers, filtering these to black and white and then experimenting with blending modes (my favourites are overlay and soft light) can give your image a more ghostly feel. Adding masks means that you can control which parts of the image show.

I frequently ask the models to move during the ghostly shots. Shaking their head so that their hair moves or walking during the exposure gives a much better blur than any of the Photoshop filters. The poor model was quite dizzy by the time we had finished the sequence below.

This picture was more difficult to achieve. To start the author wanted a horizontal picture and I had only shot this sequence as verticals. Cropping would leave bands of blank space at the sides. I used content aware fill in Photoshop to generate these.

Sometimes selection crop and checking generative fill works well but it is often better to crop to the your background colour and then select the area and go to Edit-Content Aware Fill as this gives more control; allowing you to select the areas used as reference.

I copied the figure to a new layer and then used content aware fill to paint an approximation of the background into the selection where she had been. It is worth noting that generative fill in Photoshop refuses to work on anything that involves nudity. The clone healing brush and remove tools helped clean up the filled in background. This does not have to be perfect as we are going to superimpose the figure back onto it.

The process is then similar to the first image. Black and white and colour layers were created, masked and blended together.

I have a growing collection of pictures of gravestones, spooky backgrounds and sculptures that I can add to my pictures. The skeleton in the alcove in the image below was photographed in a graveyard in Austria and appears in several of my finished pictures.

More Articles and Folios

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• 
  Portfolio – Mixed Digital Media
• 
  Creating Ghostly Nude Photographs
• 
  Gothic and Horror – Photomontages
• 
  Ghostly Nudes
• 
  Gothic Nudes – Photomontages
• 
  A Little Bit Kinky – Fetish Photography
• 
  Are Nude Models Exhibitionists?
• 
  Glamour Photography Portfolio
• 
  Scrap Yard Nudes
• 
  Fetish Book Cover Photographs
• 
  Beyond Glamour Photography
• 
  The Concept – Take Better Photographs of Nudes

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