Have you ever looked for something in a dresser, cabinet, basement or attic and just couldn’t find it? You know you have that one thing you’ve been looking for and needing for an important task. If only you had some sort of catalog or database to quickly find that item. That is one of the things that I have been asked to help out with here at IMM. We want a catalog of all of our costumes, wardrobe, and props so that we can easily find what we need when we need it.
Right now at IMM, we have hundreds if not thousands of costumes that we are looking through for the Heritage Project. One of the things we are doing is creating a catalog for all these costumes. We are doing this to make it easier to find costumes and wardrobe pieces for future productions that we will make at IMM. In order to do that we are photographing every costume on a mannequin, lovingly nick named Manny. Then we are cutting out the costume and creating alpha channels to use in this catalog. Its a daunting task, but it has to get done.
People are always asking me how to cutout things for different types of designs and composites. With that being said, here is a photoshop tutorial teaching exactly how we are cutting out all these costumes and creating an alpha channel for later use. These techniques can be used for a wide variety of applications from print to video. Please let us know what you think about this tutorial in the comments, and we hope you find it useful in your ministry.
