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