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Lesson Info

How To Do A Color Double Exposure Effect

So I'm gonna open up the first file here that I have for you guys today, and we're gonna be creating a double exposure effect. And, um, this image here of this woman was provided by the Wonderful with Lindsay Adler. And we also have this busy city. And I'm sure that if you guys are on social media and you guys follow, um, Photoshopped related websites or other people who do photo shop, you see the double exposure effect everywhere. So it's not This is not really something new, But I'm gonna show you a way of creating it. That gives you a lot of control, not only in the effect that we're creating, but also with the color. So first, we're gonna create the double exposure effect using just, uh, uh, black and white images. And then we're gonna add color to that to create a more interesting effect. So the first thing that we're gonna do is set up this file, so it's easier to adjust later. So we have the model in the bottom in the city on top. What I'm gonna do first is create a black and wh...

ite adjustment layer, which will, of course, turn everything black and white. Then I'm just gonna delete the layer. You don't have to delete the layer if you don't want to. I person like to do so just cause in it makes me feel better. Just having a clean layers panel so you can leave it there if you want to. So that's a black and white adjustment layer. Then we're gonna create an exposure adjustment layer again. I'm gonna delete the layer mask, then a solid color adjustment layer. The color is not important. At this point. Black is OK and again delete the layer mask. But in this case, I'm gonna change the blend mode to color, and I'm gonna disable it for now. Then I'm gonna create a levels adjustment layer and delete the layer mask. So we're gonna use all these layers to control the model that the photo that Lindsay provided for us, I'm gonna need those exact same layers on the image on top. So to save myself a little time, I'm gonna hold shift, click on the top layer and then hold shift and click on the black and white layer, which is the one at the bottom and is gonna make a selection out of all the layers and I compress command G. That's control G on the pc to turn that into a group. So now they're only one group, and actually, I want the model in there as well. Someone I click and drag that in there. But before I do, I'm just gonna duplicate this group by pressing command J. And it duplicates the group. A little side note. If you are using photo shop, see as five and older, that keyboard shortcut doesn't work, so you actually have to click and drag it over into the new layer. I come to duplicate the group, but if you're Houston CIA six or New York Command J to duplicate the group, so we have these adjustment layers making just click and drag it above the city layer and click and drag that image the city into that group and click and drag Um, the models later into the group in the bottom. And I can rename gonna call the one in the bottom bottom image the one on top top image. Pretty simple. And I'm gonna expand their group so we can so that we can see the contents. I want the photographs to be at the very bottom of the stack, so I'm just gonna click and drag him down, and I'll do the same for the city here Now, with the top image group, I'm going to change the blend mode to lighten. And when I enable the busy city and notice that that right there just doing that created a very convincing double exposure effect. And you might be thinking, Well, just changing one blaming motor, Why did you create so many layers? Well, that's the video photo shop. We have a lot of control. And for those of you that know me, you guys know that when I work in a photo shop like to have as much control as possible. And that's why I created all those adjustment layer so that we can control this image and make it look better. So let's look at the adjustment layers that I created and how I use each specific one to control how the blandness applied on this double exposure adjustment layer. First of all, let's just disable this layer on top. So, um, nothing confuses us. And the first adjustment layer that I created was the black and white adjustment layer. If I enable that it turns everything black and white. If I go into the properties panel and if you don't have your properties panel open, you can go into a window and make sure that that check boxes checked properties that come up, and I'm gonna expand the properties panel so we could see this lighters with this adjustment layer allows us to do is control the luminous, the luminosity values of the colors of the layers below it. So in this case, if I click and drag the red notice, our skin gets darker. There's a lot of red and skin tones, so we adjust the luminous values of the image. Then we have the exposure adjustment layer, and that one's pretty self explanatory. We adjust the exposure of any given image when I click on this icon here to reset that adjustment, and I'm actually going to be the same thing on the black and white adjustment layer just so that I'm not really making any real adjustments around. The color fail adjustment layer, which is set to the color blending mode, is going to give a color to the image right now said to blacks was turning it black and white. But if I change this to read, it turns it red. So, um, we're gonna come back into the levels adjustment later, cause I think it'll make more sense when I explain it at a later point. But this, uh, adjustment layer is also gonna help us control how the image blends. So what I'm gonna do now is enable the layer on top. So now we have both, um, groups active. Now I can come in here and adjust with the black and white adjustment layer. I can adjust the colors of the buildings in cars and people that are in the background. But remember the way that the luminous the lighten adjustment layer works is that it shows bright pixels, but it conceals a dark one. So anything in between this divider here above lighten and below the lighter color adjustment layer. These five blend modes keep bright pixels in Hyde Park pixels. So what That knowledge We can take the black and white adjustment layer and drag the sliders around to either show or hide specific colors on that background layer. So notice when I click and drag on the yellow and actually let me, ah, move the image of the business city up. There's some, uh, this photo was second in New York, So there's a yellow cab there and I can click on the black and white adjustment later. And with the yellow, if I drag it all the way to the right, it shows more or disappear so you can adjust the, um, luminous values of the layer below it with this targeted adjustment. Of course, if you wanted to, you could add a layer mask and then target a specific area. So you have even more control over the image in the back, the exposure. I mean, this is a difficult creating a double exposure adjustment. So now we're changing the exposure to reveal more of the background or reveal Les in the background. So you confined to in that as you need to. I said I was gonna talk about the levels adjustment, uh, later on, and now is that time. So I'm gonna click on the levels adjustment layer, and I like to use the levels adjustment layer on top because it allows me to adjust sort of what I like to think of it as the contrast of the image, the black point in the boy white point of the image. And with these lighters we can determine how dark the black point is and how bright the white point is. So if I click and drag this slider here were telling Photoshopped that all the values that are here and to the left will be black or whatever the black point is set to in this case is black. Notice how this point here is that to black. But if I click and drag this or to the right, that black point is the lower blood black now is this shade of grey. So this is why I like to have this layer on top because it gives me more control of how the black point of set in the white point instead and it affects all the layers below it, and it helps the image blend a little bit better. And as I mentioned before, this is the color. So now that we know how the layers work, we can so we can start working more about the actual aesthetics of the images is all up to you. You decide what looks good to your eye. So for now, I'm just gonna press the V key on the keyboard to select the move toe click and drag the back run around. And I think that maybe, you know, maybe somewhere there looks good. I can come back and see if I need to make any black and white adjustments. Maybe I need to just brighten up the dark enough to sky a little bit. I don't want it to be completely white and maybe show tomorrow those calves, Maybe that's too much. So bring it back. So again, you're just looking at the image, adjusting this lighters in different elements of the image you're gonna pop out or pop in, and you can decide what looks best to your eye. And then you have those same adjustment layers with the layer below it. So again we can adjust the exposure to see ah, what works better and again, the black and white adjustment layer. So it's a lot of fine tuning a lot of things that you can do Teoh make this effect work. Um, one thing that I want to show you is under window extensions. You have the adobe color themes, and this is a little plug in here that allows you to select different colors in analogous, monochromatic triad complimentary all the different types of color combinations that you can have. We're just gonna focus on complementary, which is just two colors, which are opposite in the color wheel. So the opposite of blue in this case would be this yellow orange there so you can decide what color you like. Click and drag, and then you'll see the color that you selected and into the opposite end. The opposite colors are red and green opposite colors, so when I look for maybe a blue here, so the here's our blue in here is our orange with the blue Select that I can click on this icon here to set the active color, which means make that the foreground color. I compress X on the keyboard. Or click on this a row here to make the former and color of the background color and vice versa. So now the foreground color is, uh, white, which was the white background before, and I can click on the orange here and then click on set active color. So those are my two colors that they're that we're gonna use for the double double exposure effect. We finalize the black and white, and you could just be done with it there if you want. So I'm just gonna take it to the next level and now use color on each individual layer to make it even more interesting. So I can click on this color fill adjustment layer and just select either blue or the yellow. So, in this case, also like the ah, yellow color, their press okay, thing going to the top image enable this layer double click on it and select the blue. And that creates a double exposure color effect that again you can come in. And now that we introduce color into the image, the original adjustments may not work. So we may need to make more judge adjustments to refine the image and make it look even better. So I'm just gonna quickly make a few adjustments here. And if you decide that these colors don't work for you, maybe you can swap them. You can just make this yellow instead of blue, and you can make this blue instead of yellow. And as you can see now, we may need to make more adjustments. Which is why we created all these adjustment layer so that we could target the colors, the luminous values independently. Um, I'm gonna disable the colors, and I'm just gonna show you one other thing with the, um, color level exposure here. Um, if we have it black and white and you don't want to use colors in the way I just showed you, you can simply create a Grady and map, and this is gonna map colors to the luminous values. So if I reverse it, you'll see that the dark values are blue. In the brighter values are yellows. Remember how the background was white? Well, now, the brightest possible color will be this color here, in this case, yellow and the darkest possible color will be blue and usually is the other way around. But I reverse them so that they would work with this image. So in reality, when you open this up, the dark, luminous values on the left and the bright, luminous values are on the right. And there's a Grady in between. The color you have here and the color you have here on the right. So if those someone work, just click on the reverse check box to invert those.