Image Manipulation Tutorial 1: The Double Exposure Effect

Welcome all to the first of many image manipulation tutorials to come as requested by you, the Sythe community. I believe it relevant to to start this tutorial with a disclaimer: although all of these tutorials have a difficulty rating, I have endeavoured to make sure artists of any ability, including those new to photoshop, can follow the instructions. However, if you are a new artist, it may take you slightly longer than I have suggested.

This tutorial explains how you can achieve the double exposure effect using Photoshop. Traditionally this is created by photographers by flashing images in front of a camera during multiple exposures; however, we can use image manipulation to mimic this effect. The double exposure effect is popular with far more than just photographers; it's popular with many artists, particularly abstract artists. Here are some examples of the double exposure effect. Credit is given to tutsplus for this tutorial. I have taken their original, refined techniques, and given you some further freedom.

Spoiler: View the Result

For this tutorial you'll need two things. Firstly, you'll need a reasonably high resolution portrait of yourself against a light and flat background; backgrounds such as mountains or other objects will make it hard to cut yourself out. Secondly, you'll need an image to overlay onto it. I've used the standard trees/lake landscape that I've seen in almost every tutorial I've seen demonstrating the technique. You can use the sample materials this time round if you'd like.

Spoiler: Use some Sample Materials

Portrait 1
Portrait 2

Overlay 1

STEP 1

Open up the portrait in a new document in Photoshop. Crop it down with a ratio of 1:1 so that you're working with a nice size.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 2

Next we need to brighten the guy up a little. Press Ctrl + L to bring up the levels menu. Moving the light slider left will increase brightness and moving the dark slider right will increase contrast.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 3

Let's tidy the portrait up a little. Select the spot healing brush by pressing J and go over any blemishes or bumps on the face. I'm going to tidy my guy's ear up a little...

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 4

This is where the flat background comes in handy. To remove the background, select the magic wand tool by pressing W. Set a reasonable sample size and tolerance and click on the background area. Now right click on the select and click "select inverse". You should end up with a selection of your man. Alternatively, if you are having trouble with this, use the quick selection tool to select the portrait's body.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 5

Still armed with your tool, select the refine edge button to open the refine edge window.

Slightly increase the Radius value in the Edge Detection, setting it to around 1.5, making the edges less rigid and thus revealing minor details, such as separate hairs. Set the Output To in the Output section of the options window to New Layer with Layer Mask. This will automatically create a copy of your initial image with the background hidden by the Clipping Mask.

You can play with other Refine Edge options as well, making the edge slightly smoother or more blurred.

Select OK.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 6

Create a new layer below the masked portrait layer and fill it with a light greyish colour. You should now be left with two layers.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 7

Now let's think about the overlay. Take your overlay image; a cityscape, landscape, or something abstract, and place it on a new layer above the masked portrait layer.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 8

Ensuring the overlay layer is still selected, press Ctrl and click on the layer mask of the masked portrait layer. "Marching ants" will appear over the top of your overlay.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 9

Ensuring the overlay layer is still selected and marching ants are still appearing over it, select "Add layer mask". Click on the chain on the overlay layer so that it disappears in order to unlink it.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 10

Move the portrait layer over the overlay layer. Ensuring the portrait layer is selected, press Shift-Ctrl-U to make it monochromatic (grayscale).

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 11

We just need to make a few more tweaks to the portrait before we go forward. Add to the contrast by opening the levels menu (Ctrl-L) and changing the blacks value to 120.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

Now go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. On the pop-up, select colorize and enter the values (220,10,0).

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 12

Right click on the portrait layer mask and select "apply layer mask". Set the blend mode of this layer to "screen". We're starting to see the double exposure effect come through now, but there's still a little more work to do...

Spoiler: View Screenshot

STEP 13

Select the brush tool (B). Use a nice soft brush with 0% hardness. with a reasonable size. Selecting the layer mask of the overlay layer, use a BLACK FILL to remove parts and clean the portrait up and a WHITE FILL to bring out bits more. You can then select the portrait layer and the eraser to erase and white residue left behind afterwards.

Spoiler: View Screenshot

At this point I'm going to leave it up to you to play around with your piece and edit it accordingly. I hope you enjoyed this first tutorial; there are more to come. Please do post your results and any questions!

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Awesome tutorial, goodjob. I'm sure this will help lots of people

 

Thanks bud. Thought it would help boost the section a little. Always fun to try something new!

 

Great tutorial bro. Props to you for putting this all together!

 

Cheers! Took a few hours but would and will do it again.

 

This is great man, thank you very much. I won't be using it myself probably as I barely do any GFX work, but I just wanted to let you know I really admire and respect this.

 

Thank you!! I understand that a lot of you are busy but it's nice to get such positive feedback. Hopefully a few designers here have a chance to try this as it is truly quite a great technique.

 

Wow got a rush of nostalgia reading through this thread, reminds me of myself 10 years ago when I first starting dabbling in photoshop and created my own signature.

 

That's a really in depth guide you made, thanks for sharing it. Might get back into some photoshop stuff now

 

Great tutorial my man. I've tried countless times and have concluded GFX work is not for me, but I can respect a great guide when I see one. Looking forward to seeing more of these from you in the future

 

You really should! It's such a good and satisfying hobby to have, even if you don't continue commercially!

Cheers, it's nice to see such a good uptake on this

 

Great tutorial, thanks so much! Definitely will use this some time.

 

Cheers! Give it a go, would love to see your end product.