Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Create a Double Exposure

we're gonna do a double exposure time. So in order to do this, the first thing, I guess when you're planning a double exposure, it helps if you know in advance what you want to be doing. So you know, if you get the opportunity to shoot an image that you're planning Teoh double exposed with something, then that's great. Then you have a lot more control. This is all done after the fact. So in that case, then you want to be looking for images that work well, so that could take a lot of experimentation and trial and error. So the way that this effect has been all over the Internet a lot of time that then profile. So you'll see someone's profile to the side, and then they'll have, like, a forest for the rest of their faith or something. Um, anything that could be really awesome. But in this case, just playing around with images I really liked incorporating her face into it, not just the shape of her profile, but actually her face and being able to see her eyes. So I'm gonna mix that in and ...

show you how you can blend it. Ah, little more custom in that regard, but there's a lot of different ways to do this. So the other thing is, it helps. In this case, I wanted a lot of dark area, so she's got dark hair, so that works really nicely for being ableto cover with with imagery. Um, and of course, we're going to be removing the background. So this is a nice, clean background helps. But, you know, however much time you want to spend, making those kinds of selections is up to you. But this image works pretty nicely. We're going to give it a shot here, so I'm gonna go ahead and select her, and I'm just gonna do that by grabbing the magic wand and the magic one. Make selections based on color similarities. So this background is it have ingredient. It's not flat, but it's gonna work with the magic one with the tolerance of 32. That's how accepting the magic wand is going to be of other colors. So based on where I click, it's gonna select similar, similarly colored pixels, and that's how we're gonna make the selection. So I'm gonna start by just clicking over here, and it did a pretty decent job. Of course, her hair is going to be tricky. And it missed this whole area over here. So I'm gonna add to that by holding the shift key down. And we see that my cursor gets a little plus sign when I hold shift. And that allows me to add to the selection by again clicking over here. So did a pretty decent job. Um, I have continuous turned off. That means that even if I click over here or over here, that photo shop is going to jump over her hair and get the little islands of color. So it's non continuous. If I had this checked, that means I'd have to go through her hair and click every little pocket that has background showing. And that sounds like a nightmare. So we don't do that. So I turned off continuous. So we have this big selection, but because I turned off continuous and I have a tolerance of 32 if you look closely like in her eyes, you can see that it's selected the white of her eyes as well as some of this area of her hair. So I need to do a little bit of a cleanup before this is gonna work. To do that, I'm going to grab the lasso tool, which allows me to just freehand draw selection and I'm going to subtract. So these modifier keys up here, they let you tell photo shop. If you want to add new selection or subtract from a selection or a number of other things in this case, I want to subtract. So that's the button right here. If I hover over it, it should. If you ever don't know what something is, you can hover. And when you're not on camera, it will work. All right. Well, normally a little tag would come up and say Subtract whatever, but don't do it for me now, of course. So I'll just click it myself. This is what I was doing when I held shift with the Magic one. That's sort of Ah, a shortcut way of switching these. Anyway, I'm going to just come up here and click it and then I'm just going to drag a big loop through this area. Teoh sweep up all that mess and now we see it's gone. Well, come down here and get her eyes and whatever else is within my I'm not gonna worry too much about the hair. And I'm holding down the space bar so I can drag through. There's a lot of little stragglers. Here we go. All right, so we have that selected. But now I have the background selected and not her and actually want her. So we're going to inverse the selection, but coming up to select menu and choosing inverse so that just turns it inside out. So now she selected not the background. But we started by selecting the background because that's the way easier than trying to like her now because of this hair. We need to finesse this a little bit, because if we work with it right now, it will just look like it was cut up by a I don't know, ransom doing a serial killer. Somebody like Dexter did this incentive ransom note. Yeah, so we need to finesse it. So I'm going to come up to the select menu and I'm going to come down to refine edge, and that's going to allow us just like the title says. It's gonna allow us to refine the edge so what it's showing me right now is called the Mask View. So in photo shop we have things called masks, which will be using on. I'll show you them in a number of different contexts, but the masks are just made of black and white, so they allow things to show or to be hidden. And in this case, it's showing us our selection, which is normally visible as these marching ants, right? You know, that's the technical name for those. I mean, it's even look, it's written in photo shop. That's not just me trying to be cute, but that the dhobi right there. So these are marching ants and marching ants are great, but they don't let us see the fine detail of a selection. So when we need to finesse her hair, we can't see the finesse with ants. So we switch and it does by default. Here it's going to switch to the black and white mask view because then we can really see what's happening, and I'm not gonna get super obsessed with making the world's most perfect selection. But I'll just turn on Smart Radius and I'll just bump this over and you can see, it kind of gets a little Let's it gets a little smoother and a little more. Harry, I guess of the word because we're selecting her hair, we go too far. Photo shop has to chew on it. And then maybe that ends up being better or worth. I don't know. We'll go. We'll just keep this about here. All right? So I'm going to just say I'm happy with that and I'm gonna click, OK? And now we're back, actually, toe ants. But they've been finessed. We just can't see it because they're marching it. So the next thing that we're going to dio is pop this up and out of this layer, so we're gonna jump It jumped the contents of the selection into their own layer. The keyboard shortcut for that is command J or controlled J. And that that jumps a copy up into its own layer. So we're essentially done with this background layer. We'll just go ahead and get rid of it for now. And she's up here by herself. Now we're ready to drag something in here and cover her up with it. So I happen to have this image right here and again when you're making double exposures, you really have to experiment you guys because you may be like I love this image and I'm gonna blend it with this other image that I love. And then you put him together and you're like, That is not compatible. Think, don't work. It's like casting for a movie or something. You have to have chemistry. So you have to find two images that are gonna work well together for what you want. Todo So it does take some experimentation. In this case, I really liked how these worked out. So I'm gonna drag this over by grabbing the move tool, and we're just going to click. This is a little dance How I like to teach this. So I'm going to click, and I'm going to drag with my cursor up to the tab and then I pause and wait till it switches. Then I can drag down, and then I'm gonna hold shift and drop, and then it just plopped right into place. So that was click drag, shift, drop. The shift keeps the image from skipping out into orbit. I call it so I don't know if you've ever done this. If you really need a photo shop, then I'm telling you all of this and you're not even appreciating it because you've never had this happen. But if you don't pay attention, then this will happen to you and then you'll be like I wish I paid it. So if you don't hold shift when you drop like that, you may be fine. But often what can happen is that object. Whatever it is, we'll land out here on your paste board area and you won't see it. This is a bad example, cause this image is huge, so it's gonna land. But if it was something small, if we were dragging a small object from one image and compositing it into another. If you don't hold shift when you drop it, it might skip out and land like over here, and then you'll think you didn't do it, and then you do it 12 times and you're like it's still not working. And then your layer pilots a mess and you have no idea what's happening. And it just skipped into orbit, so shift will center it and just put it in your frame, and then you can move it around. So right now, this is huge. If I press command t, I can get a bounding box on it. So we see that it's rather large. I'm gonna go ahead and leave it large for now, and we can scale it later if we need to. But first I want to go ahead and get it cut to her. Now there's a couple ways to do this. I could go ahead and just clip it to her, meaning that we use her shape as a way to mask it. Sort of like there's so many analogies for this. It's sort of like the game rock, paper, scissors, right? So if you are the rock and the food, the paper, the paper covers the rock right and it it folds and takes on the shape of the rock. So in this sense, this would be the rock. I'll just name it the Rock Johnson. That's the Rock, and this would be the paper. That's one way to think of it. Another way that I like to explain it is that this level, the lower one here, would be glue, and this top level layer would be glitter So when you made, like, preschool art projects and you would squirt glue all over paper and then dump glitter, the glitter would stick in the shape of the glue. Same thing. So what we're going to do with clip this down to this? The longhand way of doing that is under the layer menu. I never even noticed. I don't do it this way. Here, layer, create clipping mask. And then there's this big Harry keyboard shortcut. I don't do that one either, but you could. What I usually do is I do it in the layers panel and I hold down Ault or option. And then I position my cursor right between these two layers. And then you get this weird looking icon, and when you click, it takes on that shape. Okay, so this is one option. Um, but I don't think it gives us quite as much flexibility as the way I'm gonna show. You were going to use a layer mask. And the reason is I might want to adjust the way that this fits or the shape of it or something. And I don't I just don't have as much freedom and flexibility to do it, um, in this way. So I'm gonna unclip it and we'll do it with a layer mask. Soto unclip it. You just repeat holding down all four options and then click again. You can see, by the way, when it is clipped, this layer gets indented, and then there's a little arrow, so that lets you know that they're clipped together. So I'm gonna unclip it by just repeating the whole thing. And instead, we're gonna use a layer mask. Okay, so I want the layer mask to be in her shape. So I'm gonna load her back up as a selection, which is really simple, since we already made her on her own layer here, I'm gonna hold down command or control and click on the some nail. And now we see marching ants. And because this layer is active, if I want to add a mask, all I do is come down to the bottom of the layers panel and this button not to be confused with the union. This button is the mask. Someone told me once that they thought it looked like a camera. And I thought, You are right. It does, but it's not again. It's a mask. So I'm going to click on it. And now we see that she is indeed cut into that. The back the images cut into her shape. But now we have this thing right here. This is called a layer mask. So the effect is the same is clipping it, but with a little bonus because of more creditable in this way. So the layer mask works by just really like the name sounds its a mask. So it hides things or it shows things. So if you were gonna go, I guess Rob a bank or something, you'd probably wear a mask. I don't know. I'm sounding like a criminal here. Don't rob any banks, But if you do, I imagine you'd want a mask, um, to hide your face. This is a mask that's gonna hide parts of this layer. So this layer has this big northern life scene, and the mask shows any area that is painted with black is going Teoh, hide or block. I say block that part of the image from showing so conveniently now it just is in her shape, which is pretty neat. Uh, it's also linked here to the image itself. Which means if I grab my move, tool and I drag Oops. Now I have moved the mask and the image that it's it's connected with, right? So if I want to adjust this like, maybe a tree is falling in a weird place and I don't like it, I wanna unlinked thes two things. And I can do that by just clicking on that link so that it disappears. And now I can click to target the image versus the mask. Right now, the mask is active because we see that with by the white highlights. So if I click over here to target the image itself and now I can reposition it within the mask Pretty sweet. So I'm just gonna sort of guess that this is gonna be good about right here. It's hard to say because I can't see her face Now. We have a lot of different ways that we could move forward. Um, we could just change the blend mode, maybe to something like Multiply who that's moody, right? Maybe when you want to try something like overly Mm. I don't like that. One is much. Um maybe we want to keep it, nor we want to go back to normal, and maybe we just faded a little bit. There's so many possibilities of how you might want to do this, so it depends ultimately what your goal is. But let's go ahead and say We really want This is a vivid if possible, and I don't want too much of her showing through like I don't want the texture in her hair to show. So if I switch to something like Multiply, I can see now her hair right, It's not just completely covered with the northern lights image, so I don't want to be a multiply, but maybe you would. You have Teoh, you know, feel this out. But let's say that I want I want to see her face, though, because it looks sort of, I don't know, As a kid, I used to watch the show called Unico, if anyone, any people in the Internet remember Unico. But there was a character called The Night Sky, and this reminds me of the night sky, so I feel like I need to see her face. All right, But if I lower the opacity of this whole thing then we see her hair. And so how are we gonna keep her hair blocked? But I still want to see her face. Well, that's why it's awesome to have a mask because now I can just paint it and blended in. However, I want Teoh so the math works by painting with black or white or gray something in between. So to do this, I'm gonna make sure I target the mask itself. So it's not enough to just click on this layer. You have to actually click the mask some new, and I'm going to grab my paintbrush, which is this weird shape which will come to in a minute. So I need to make just a soft round brush something like this. Okay, I can change my brush size by a pressing the left or the right bracket keys on my keyboard. You can also come up here and fiddle with the slider, but you will feel like Goldie Locks because all day long you'll be like, How big is 49 pixels? Oh, that's way too little. I needed to be like this big. Oh, my gosh is too cute. Whatever, you will be screwing around up there all day, so I can't say I recommend it. Instead, you probably want to reach for these bracket keys. Left bracket makes it smaller, right bracket makes it bigger. And then in this case, I want the edge to be soft. So you could again come up here and there's a hardness slider. So it goes from zero on the left to 100% on the right. Uh, I want zero, but let's pretend I'm just in the middle here, So if I want to do that with the keyboard, I'm gonna hold shift left bracket and it looks like it's getting smaller. But don't be fooled. It's really just getting harder or softer. Um, and we can now I hit shift left bracket to make it all the way soft. And we can see that if we click up here that it's back a zero now, OK, so that is really a handy keyboard shortcut, and what I want to do is block some additional parts of this northern life image from her face. So to block the image, I want to paint with black because black blocks. So I want black to be my active color on top here. So I'm going to flip flop these by pressing the little macaroni noodle. Or you can press X on your keyboard that will exchange your color swatches. Right. So I want black on top. And now I don't just wanna paint because that looks pretty bad that just 100% blocked her block to the northern lights from her face. And that looks a little more extreme than what I wanted. So what I'm going to do is come up here in my options bar for my brush tool, and I'm gonna lower my opacity and I'm going to start with, like, 10% and just gently do maybe one more little who? Something like that, right? And now it's all cool. And I mean, her hair is still, you know, if I wanted maybe I want some of our haired show so I could, like, do this a little bit. So it's a little more transitional. So this allows you to really go in and find Tunis as much as you need Teoh. And if you make a mistake, this is the beauty of the masks. If you make a mistake and let's say that I I don't know. My cat jumped on the keyboard or something. And somehow, or more likely now, my son, he really loves the track pad. And he does amazing things when he gets his hands on the track tab. And then I have to spend an hour trying to figure out how to undo them. So if he did this, I could fix it easily by just flipping my colors back. So again, I'd press X to exchange the colors. Whichever colors on top here, that's gonna be your active color. And then I could just paint this. Oh, actually, no, I lied. Now I'm making it a little harder. Hold on. Here's what we can't do. We can't just paint it. Let me switch the brush back to 100% and show you why. Because this was carefully in her nice shape before, right? If I just start painting with White coupe, I mean, I'd have to paint perfectly in the lines to fix it. So we are screwed. Just kidding. We're not screwed. No, no, no, Never. No. So what? We're going to do it. That's actually really simple. We just have to get our marching ants back in her shape. So it's going to force us so we can only color within the lines. And then we don't worry about it. So to do that, I'm just gonna stay here. I'll stay on this active mask in the northern lights layer, but I'm gonna load the marching ants from her layer by Commander Control clicking on her thumb. Now, now that I have ants here, I can go back and I can paint, you know, whatever I need, Teoh. I can paint it all back in, and I will be constrained to Onley the area where it already exists. That makes sense. So now, of course, we went too far. So I'll switch this back, go back to 10% and just kind of put her face back in there. Do you guys have any questions about that? I think you've answered the question that had come in when you were doing the inverse. That was from Louise Lorenzo. That said, And if I want to dio the layer mask the opposite Oh, okay. So let me think how I want to go back. So let me duplicate this layer and then I'll just hide it so we can Okay, I'll trash this layer mask groups, Yes, So you can do the inverse of a mask if you would rather. So if I have this area selected and I instead want to mask the opposite I mean, there's a lot of ways to do this. The easiest and least confusing probably is to hold down the option key when you click the mask button. So if I hold down option and click it and now we have to hide her because it's showing through to her. But now it masked the inverse. So you see how this mask in this mask are opposite. That's what's happening. Or, I suppose, another way. This is where it gets a little mind war peace. You have to just find what makes sense to you. Another thing that you could dio is just go Teoh this mask here and you can actually load the mask. You can actually view the mask itself by Ault clicking Yes, on the mask. So now we're no longer looking at the image. We're looking just at the mask itself and you can actually inverse that by pressing commander control. I So you can take your existing mask and just inverse it as well. So I hope that an third there question anything? Yeah. Were there any other ones? Okay, so yeah, and then I guess, you know, I just think that looks so ethereal. Like who? The night? Yeah, but we probably want a background in new background here. So you know, whatever you want to do, we could just add in a new layer. We would drag it behind. And then, gosh, I guess I didn't plan a background for this. White would be an easy one that comes to mind. But to do that, I just added a new layer by clicking the new layer button. I want to drag it to make sure it's underneath all this good stuff to fill it with white. There's a lot of things you can dio. You can come to the edit menu and choose at it, Phil. And then you can choose for contents White. That will always be there as an option. But I don't know. My method of choice is I. I will press d to make sure I have my default colors here, which is black on top and white back here, and then I can just fill this background or this layer with whatever color is my background watched by pressing command, delete or actually on a PC. It's reversed, and I think it's all delete to fill with your background color. It confuses me every time, but I pretty sure it's all delete on a PC for the background, color and option delete on a Mac or control on a PC to fill it with your foreground color. So I use that all the time. But you know, whatever works for you, or you can add an adjustment layer down here. There's so many options you could do with solid color feel that way. But, um, I do think that so, yeah, so pretty and so simple. It's really, really pretty simple. So it just depends if you are working with an image. If you like that profile, which I really do love that. But then when I was messing around with this, I just loved it. But the profile is pretty cool to, um, but then lighting ends up making a big You have to make a lot of decisions to like, Do you want to see them, the detail of the faith or not, and so I don't know. It's fun. I'd love to see what people end up creating.