Remember our cutout collections ? Since they were quite popular, we added another dimension: An interactive lightmixer!

For this post we tried to take things one step further. As said our cutout collections have been published quite some years back. Still, having good cutouts is useful in the architectural illustrations industry, we figured. If you are with me, chances are you had several situations where you needed a cutout with a very specific lighting situation: For example a person in a night time shot facing a bright light, possibly even with a very specific light tint.

Well, these cutouts might be just the solution! This set of cutout people comes with several layers that allow you to be prepared for exactly that tricky lighting! Each file contains a set of folders each with a distinct light direction. Just mix them as it suits your specific case.

How did we do it?

Frankly, there is still space for optimization in the process. As with most xoio-air entries, we are looking how to produce quality stuff with an efficient workflow. For this one we took a set of photos of a non-moving person while moving a light source around, An additional ambient light pass was additionally done. While this is actually pretty simple, the difficult part is for a person to hold 100% still for a period of a couple of seconds. We all tend to move a couple of centimeters easily while trying to stand still, it’s just natural. So a fair amount of manual work was necessary here to get the shots matched in postproduction. We found that Affinity Photo Designer offers a brilliant liquify tool which helped here ( and it’s super affordable and no we don’t get any shares. We just love friendly software companies. Of course you can use Photoshop, but the layer display options never worked for me while Affinity is way more intuitive and quite powerful).

The resulting cutouts are not perfect – some blurring might be visible in closeups. But for the average use of a cutout people, the quality should be fine. Anyhow, it’s free, so no use in complaining, right?

As always these files are open for commercial and personal use – as long as you don’t do anything stupid with it. Please read the disclaimer if you are not sure or drop us a line. Files have been created with Photoshop CS6, but the Tifs should allow downward compatibility. Stay good and spread the good vibes!

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