GIMP Version: 2.8.14
Operating System: Windows
OS Version: 10
GIMP Experience: New User

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I am new to photography, and helping a friend with his daughter's senior pictures. I am trying to achieve the dark background, highlighting the basketball hoop, with her in focus in the front. These are the example image she found, and the photo I have take. I'm not sure what this technique is called, so I haven't been able to find a tutorial. Can anyone help? Thank you!

This is not an "effect", this is because the picture was taken with a (side) flash. Due to the flash short range far-away objects get a lot less light than the subject and appear under exposed. Of course you can perhaps emulate that in Gimp but this will be a lot of work (you need to make a proper selection on the person, in particular).

I had wondered that. Thank you!

Try>colors> desaturate and then colors> threshold to outline the hair real good. That will be the hardest part.
Then once you have the hair strands pretty close color in the entire person in black. The rest color white.
Now colors>invert

This will be your layer mask.
Are you familiar with layer masks and how to use them?

I've done a few using tutorials, but no, not terribly familiar.

The XCF file was to large to attach here. (13 mb) 5mb is the allowable size limit.
So i took a screenshot to show you what i did.

Masks can be very useful with projects like this because they are non destructive. If you mess up you can re paint black or white on the mask to fix it. The actual image stays intact.

After adding the mask i selected her first and used brightness contrast then i selected the hoop and did the same.

Hope that helps.

Thank you so much! I can't wait to try it!

The finished image



i did a crop before creating the mask.
Steps...

1) open the image and duplicate it.
2) top copy - crop to liking
3) top copy - Colors>desaturate with luminosity
4) top copy - Colors>Threshold to get black and white with subject mostly black
5) bottom layer - right click, select add layer mask - white full opacity
6) top layer - Edit>Copy
7) bottom layer - click on mask and Edit>Paste into - anchor layer
8) top layer - delete
9) you should now have one layer with a layer mask that has your black and white layer copied into it.
10) create a new black bottom layer
11) start painting the mask white where you want the image to show through and black if you want to just see black.

After you are done editing the mask and you like the results. use Colors>Brightness and Contrast to liking. As i said before i used the selection tool on the hoop and her separately to get better results for each.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

No problem at all. Glad to help.