How to make miniature Sports Athletes in Photoshop?

[gilbert_05339]

I'm new to the community & Photoshop. I'm just recently getting into Photoshop. I've seen some tutorials on YouTube on how to make miniature Sports Athletes. The creators are obviously good at this, but they go over the tutorial very fast and tend to skip over some steps. Can someone in the community point me to a newbie-friendly tutorial on this subject? Thanks in advance.

[Myra Ferguson]

I had to google "miniature sports athletes images" to see what you meant. 🙂

I made the following steps based on this free image from Adobe Stock:

https://stock.adobe.com/images/two-basketball-players-playing-on-outdoor-court/289739926?prev_url=de...

Before

After

The idea is to separate the ball and player from the original image, separate the ball from the player, separate the head from the player, shrink the head, shrink the body a little more than the head, and position so that it looks right.

Here's what you can do if you want to try it:

1. Take an image that includes an athlete, for example a basketball player (like the image above)
2. Duplicate the layer (Layer > New > Layer via Copy or drag the photo to the + button at the bottom of the Layers panel)
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3. Select the new layer and select Remove Background either from the Contextual Task Bar or from the Properties panel's Quick Actions.
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4. Make a loose selection around the other player and any parts that got missed and fill it in with black (Edit > Fill.. and set the color to Black -- if either the Foreground or Background are set to black, then set the dropdown menu to that otherwise use Color and select black).
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5. Deselect (Select > Deselect)
6. Duplicate this layer and turn off the visibility of the top layer.
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7. Hide the the original Background layer by clicking on the eyeball.
8. Use the Remove tool &/or Clone tool to cover up the thumb with the basketball texture.
9. Remove the player and leave only the ball by selecting the layer mask (the black and white thumbnail in the Layers panel), setting the brush to black, and drawing on the layer mask.
10. Turn off the visibility of that layer and turn on the visibility for the next duplicate layer.
11. Remove the ball to isolate the player by drawing black on it in the layer mask.
12. Use Edit > Free Transform to scale the player just a little (this is for the head size).
13. Duplicate this layer.
14. Select the player's head with the Object Select Tool with the Mode set to Lasso in the Options bar (Window > Options).
15. Invert this selection (Select > Inverse) and fill the layer mask with black.
16. Select the previous layer that shows the whole body and scale it down even more but just enough so that the head still fits on the shoulders.
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17. You may need to adjust the scaling and positioning of the body and head a few times to get them to align properly and to make the hand on the ball look right at the smaller size.
18. Turn the visibility of the original layer back on, hide the other layers, and make another duplicate of it.
19. Use the Remove tool to remove the player that you modified.
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20. Turn on the visibility of the other layers again.
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21. Crop the image to remove where his foot gets cut off.
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[gilbert_05339]

Here's a link to the tutorial that I was talking about. He's going pretty fast and I can't keep up.

Thanks for your reply.

[John Waller]

I've seen some tutorials on YouTube on how to make miniature Sports Athletes.

Any links you can provide so we can see what you've been watching?

[gilbert_05339]

https://youtu.be/g2VqQ_8HhiM?si=M8QZWBfxzprLoWbF