Darkening a picture - the ipod/U2 silouhette effect

[Kristopher]

Does anyone know a good Photoshop technique to take an image and make it really, really dark, but still keep some definitions? Much like the way Bono looks on this TV commercial:

http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/u2/ad/



1) Or was it a camera effect while filming?

2) Is it as easy as just lowering the brightness?

[Loststarz]

Does anyone know a good Photoshop technique to take an image and make it really, really dark, but still keep some definitions? Much like the way Bono looks on this TV commercial:

http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/u2/ad/



1) Or was it a camera effect while filming?

2) Is it as easy as just lowering the brightness?

Threshold effect in Photoshop, then touched up by hand would be an extremely simple way to do it to a photo, but the original is done in video, so I assume it was done in After Effects or something similar.

[Stratification]

A great technique I've used in a number of different things can be found here:
http://www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html

There's a ton of good video tutorials there, the one I'm talking about though is the advanced masking (almost all the way to the bottom). Some tweaking of that would give you what you're looking for.

[DDD]

you can use shadow/highlights.....blend modes with a color layer over the top. A layer style color overlay set to a blend mode like color burn. Those are just a couple off the top of my head. COuld be more ways.

[fasterthanlight™]

any kind of combination of brightness/contrast etc, also look into the Filters>Artistic>Cutout filter to simplify the person or object a bit.