My wife is an amateur genealogist and has several old photographs depicting large groups of her family members assembled in the typical tiered pose associated with photographs of school athletic teams and corporate group shots. She wants to make numbered silhouette charts of these photos such as this example of the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album. What is the name of this type of diagram, and is Photoshop 7.0 capable of making one? Right now she’s using tracing paper and numbering each silhouette by hand. Is there an easier way to do it?
I don’t know Photoshop specifically, but the first step would be to look up something called “edge detection”. If it works, it’ll ideally give you an outline of all of the features of the picture, which will hopefully more-or-less correspond to the different faces. It’ll probably take some tweaking of parameters to get it right, though.
Even if that doesn’t work, you can certainly do the equivalent of the tracing-paper method on the computer. Just do all of your tracing with your mouse or other input device, on a layer on top of the photograph itself. When you’re done with the tracing, take the photo layer away.
Most likely, you’d end up using a combination of the two methods, starting with the edge detection, and then fixing any flaws in it by hand. I would imagine that this would be much easier than doing it all manually.
I think it’s just called a “key” for identification, sometimes a “silhouette key” or “overlay key”.
I’d call it painting by numbers - that might not be what it actually is in this case, but you might be able to get a similar effect by searching for software designed to convert images into paint by numbers sketches.
Yeah, it’s a key. My sister is into geneology, and that’s what she calls it. I’ve only seen her trace as you describe. Painstaking, eh.
Peace,
mangeorge
You can scan a picture, then make a dot on each person’s face with a line to names on a list on the borders of the pic, but I don’t know how it’s done except thaat it’s done on a computer.
Should’ve got a mac. :smack:
Kidding. 
There’s no way to automate this.
But, Adobe Illustrator would be a better tool than Photoshop.