Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to highlight the main subject of a photo with a simple outline. Once we've added the outline itself, which we'll do using a couple of Photoshop's layer styles, we'll enhance the effect by boosting the color saturation of the main subject while decreasing saturation in the rest of the image, and we'll throw in a blur effect to further reduce the importance of the background. This photo effect works great with sports and action shots, which is where the idea for this tutorial came from, but you can use it with virtually any image.

Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial:

Here's how it will look once we've added our "outline" effect:

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Let's get started!

Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

With our photo newly opened in Photoshop, the first thing we need to do is duplicate the Background layer. This is to avoid doing any damage to our original image. If we look in the Layers palette, we can see that our photo is sitting all by itself on the Background layer:

Let's duplicate this layer by going up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choosing New, and then choosing Layer via Copy. Or, for a faster way, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac):

Either way tells Photoshop to create a copy of the Background layer for us, and if we look again in our Layers palette, we can see that we now have a copied version of the layer, which Photoshop has named "Layer 1", sitting above the original:

Step 2: Select The Main Subject Of Your Photo

Use the selection tool of your choice (Lasso Tool, Pen Tool, etc.) to draw a selection around the main subject of your photo. For clean, professional looking selections, the Pen Tool is your best bet (if you're not sure how to use the Pen Tool, you'll find everything you need to know to get up and running with it in our Making Selections With The Pen Tool tutorial), but the Lasso Tool will also work. In my case, I want to select the soccer player (or football player, depending on where you live), as well as the ball that he's about to kick, so I'll select both of them. When you're done, you should have a selection outline visible around your main subject(s):

For additional help with making selections in Photoshop, check out our Full Power Of Basic Selections tutorial, which you'll find in the Photo Editing section of the website.

Step 3: Copy The Selection To A New Layer

We need to copy the selected area to its own layer so we can work on it separately from the rest of the image. We can do that using the exact same method we used to duplicate the Background layer a moment ago except that this time, only the area inside our selection will be duplicated, not the entire image. Go back up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose New and then choose Layer via Copy, or press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Nothing will seem to have happened to the image in the document window, but if we look in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have a new layer named "Layer 2" sitting above "Layer 1", and if we look in the preview thumbnail for "Layer 2", we can see that the layer contains a copy of the main subject, while the rest of the layer is blank, indicated by the gray checkerboard pattern:

Step 4: Apply A Stroke Layer Style

To place an outline around our main subject(s), we can use Photoshop's layer styles. Click on the Layer Styles icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, which will pop up a list of all the available layer styles that we have to choose from. Select the Stroke layer style from the bottom of the list:

This brings up the Layer Style dialog box set to the Stroke options in the middle column. By default, the stroke color is set to red. Let's change it to white. Click on the color swatch to the right of the word "Color":

This brings up Photoshop's Color Picker. Select white from the Color Picker. An easy way to select white is to simply enter a value of 255 into the R, G and B options near the bottom center of the dialog box. Click OK when you're done to exit out of the Color Picker:

With the color of the stroke now set to white, let's adjust the width of the stroke. We can do that using the Size slider at the top of the Stroke options. The actual size you choose will depend on the size of the image you're working with and how large you want your stroke to appear, so keep an eye on your photo in the document window as you drag the Size slider to increase or decrease the stroke width. Dragging the slider to the right increases the stroke's width, while dragging to the left decreases it. For my image, I'm going to go with a stroke size of 4 px (pixels):

Don't click out of the dialog box just yet. We still have one more layer style to add. You should now have a white stroke around the main subject(s) in your photo:

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