Welcome


Welcome to my first tutorial post. I wanted to start sharing my knowledge to others to help improve their own skill sets, whether its photography or digital art. In today's case, its both. Today I'm going to show you how to create a double exposure in photoshop.

What is Double Exposure?

A Brief Explanation

So the double exposure has been around since the days of film photography. A lot of times it was accidental, but basically, a photographer would expose two different shots one one negative frame. Shots like this, when done intentionally, require a lot of planning, and a lot of times they would not come out right.

Making a Double Exposure Today


Now doing double exposures today is much easier now with Photoshop. You can combine any two images you wish. Here, I will show you how you can combine two images to create your own double exposure.

Phase 1

COMPILING YOUR IMAGES


The first step you will need to do is putting your two images into one photoshop file. Easiest way to do this is copying the smaller of the two images into the other. To do this, you will need to Duplicate your image. To do this, right click on the image in the layers tab, and select Duplicate Layer...

Select the image you want to create the double exposure in, and hit OK. The two images are now in one file, ready to manipulate.

Phase 2

Arranging & Composing


Now we start to create the set up to create the overlay effects. You need to arrange the images with the portrait being the lowest layer. You will then need to create a solid color layer of your choice to be at the bottom.

Once you've got these layers completed, you will need to move the background image (Spider) where you want it to be in the composition. The easiest way to do this is to change the image overlay setting to Multiply so you can see where it sits. Once you have your images roughly where you want them, it's time to create the effect.

Phase 3

Layering & Masking


This is the point where we start to manipulate layers. With the new technology in Photoshop, it has gotten much easier to do this.


1. Turn off the Non-Portrait layer (Spider)


2. Select the Portrait Layer (Taylor), and use the Select Subject button at the bottom of the image. Photoshop will select the subject from the background (as best as it can, you may need to lasso additional areas it may miss)


3. We will now create a layer mask on the Non-Portrait Layer (Spider). Select the Non-Portrait layer (Spider), and select the Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layer panel. Now that we have the mask, we can use it to create additional layers to form the rest of the composition.

Phase 4

Duplication and overlaying


Now that we have the layer mask, we can start duplicating those layers and masks to create the double exposure effect.


  • Select the layer mask, right click on it, and select the Add Mask to Selection option. You can now use the same selection from that mask to create a duplicate mask.
  • You can now select the portrait layer and apply a mask just like the previous layer, and now the portrait and background layers have masks.
  • Now here is something of note, you will see a link icon between the image and the mask, this is telling you that if you move the image, the mask will move along with it. You can decide to keep the mask locked, but I would recommend turning that off for the background layer (Spider).
  • Now that the masks are applied, we need to Duplicate [win Ctrl + J; mac Cmd + J] the portrait layer (Taylor), and move it to the top of the layer order.
  • The next step is to manipulate the layers to get the double exposure effect. For the top Portrait Layer, change the opacity type to Screen, which creates the double exposure effect. You can then start to tweak the individual images at this point to get the desired appearance you're looking for.

The Finished Result


I did some additional steps to get this look, changing a few images to black & white, slight tweaks to the opacity to get to this final look. If you've read and followed this tutorial, show me your work on social media using the hashtag #zmptutorial. I'm excited to see what you can create!

Want to Work Together?


Feel free to leave your information with me in the contact box below. We can set up a time to meet and discuss what you want to do. Hope to hear from you!