Double Exposure Effect in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Double Exposure Effect in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class; create a double exposure effect in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs, and for working in applications, such as, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating a double exposure effect in Photoshop. The effect is placing one image inside the silhouette of another image and blending them together just a little bit. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people, who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating a double exposure effect in Photoshop. 2. Double Exposure Effect Part 1: For this project, I've sourced my images from morguefile and from unplash.com and we're going to use this grizzly bear, which is from morguefile. I chose this bear because he's very easy to isolate from his background. We're not going to spend a lot of time there. But also we're looking at him pretty much side on. A lot of images are shot from the top-down and they just don't have quite the same appeal as this one. I've just looked at this and thought this is an ideal image to use. There are a few other grizzly bear on morguefile if you're interested in looking. The other image that we're going to use is from unsplash.com. It's just an image of some trees and some mist. Now there're plenty of wonderful landscape images at unsplash.com that you may want to choose to use, but I will also give you the download link for this one. We're going to start with our bear and we're going to isolate him from the background and for this the quick selection tool is really the simplest tool to use. You can increase the size of the brush with this tool by pressing the close square bracket case. That just means the brush can be really big. If you want to shrink it as you move, press the open square bracket k and that just shrinks it. Now that now that works for brushes of any type in Photoshop, so you just want to run over the bear to select him and as you're getting into these finer detailed areas, you just want to shrink your brush down. You might also want to zoom in to get a really, really good selection, but as I said, I chose this because it really is pretty easy to select around this bear so I'm just making sure I've got all the bits here and I'm pretty happy with that. So I'm now going to choose, select and because I'm working on the latest version of Photoshop, I'm using select and mask. If you're working on an earlier version of Photoshop, then you might have refined edge there, so that's pretty much the same thing, it's just the tools are in a slightly different position. If you're working with an earlier version of Photoshop, just make sure you make a good selection and then I'll show you how to get straight into the masking. Now, I made a really big mistake here and that was not deliberate. But in the new tool here in Photoshop CC, you actually have your quick select tool still available to you. It's up here. So you can flip between the refine edge tools and the quick select tool, but I'm actually not going to change this at all. I'm just going to go with what I have here so I'm just going to click, okay. Now this is the point at which you being with earlier versions of Photoshop that perhaps don't have refine edge, that's fine. At this point, all we want to do is mask this off. So we're going to double-click the background layer and click okay to make it into a regular layer, but if you know other ways of doing that, just do that and then we're going to click here on the mask icons, so just going to add a layer mask here. Now, normally before I did all this, I would have duplicated the bear image, so I had a copy of him, but the problem I'm seeing right now is that he's walking uphill and I would like him to be a little bit flatter, so what I'm going to do is go to the move tool and just kind of rotate him so that he is now walking flatter. I'm going to move him down in the image a little bit as well. So now I'm going to click the check box, and this is a duplicate of the bear that I want. So I'd like another copy of him in this position, so what we're going to do is take this layer with its mask onto the new icon. So I've got two copies of the bear both masked, and I'm just going to leave one of these out of the way so I'm just going to turn this one off. So we're just looking at the one copy, but I have a spare bear if you like there that I can use later on, and I probably will do just that. So now we've isolated out bear, we're ready to go ahead to the next step of filling him with some trees. 3. Double Exposure Effect Part 2: To fill our bear with trees we're going to need a tree image, so I'm just going to go to my tree image, which is open already in Photoshop. I'll right-click on the background layer and choose duplicate layer. Now I'm going to send the duplicate image, the copy of this layer to the file Grizzly Adams JPEG, which is the bear image. So I'm just going to do that, click "Okay" and when I go back to my bear image, you can see that very top layer is this image from un-spaced.com. Now there's a slight problem up here in this image in that there's a portion of a man-made structure that I don't really want in my image. Looking at this the quickest way of fixing it is probably going to be the patch tool, so I'm going here underneath the Spot Healing Brush Tool to get the Patch Tool and I'm going to click here on source and I'm going to just drag around the little bits that I don't want anymore. So just make a selection of these and now I'm going to drag this selection to another area of the image that just has cloudy sky in it and when I get there, I'm just going to let go and that's just removed that area sufficiently for me to be able to go ahead with the rest of the image from here. So it's a nice little trick for getting rid of things when you've got plenty of other areas that you can use to fix them with. Now, we've got the landscape on the top and the bear underneath we can just create a clipping mask for this. So we're going to clip this background to the shape of the bear with the background layer, well the tree layer selected, we're going to choose layer, create, clipping mask and that just fills the bear with the tree. Now that may or may not be the best part of the image to use. So we have the move tool selected, and this layer selected, we can move the image within the bear, so we can move it around to find the best part of the tree to go inside the bear here, and if you'd like more trees in here, you can press Control or Command 0 just to zoom out so you can see the sizing handles on this particular image. If you hold the Shift key as you drag in on the edges, you're going to constrain the proportions of the image correctly and you'll be able to get more of the trees inside the bear. So it's going to be filled with more landscape, a lot more intense color and action happening inside the image. So you can just place it wherever you want it to be and click the check mark here and control Command 0 just to zoom back out. Now I'm thinking that this bear, if we had a white background behind him, for example, would do well to have some shadow. So we're going to go ahead in the next video and we're going to create a shadow for this bear. 4. Double Exposure Effect Part 3: The easiest way to create a shadow for the bear is going to be to take this bear [inaudible]. I'm just going to click on the ladder that has isolated bear. I'm just going to use the drop shadow option. I'm clicking on this fx icon and click Drop shadow. All I want is I drop shadow of the bear, I don't really care too much about it rather scarily at this stage. I don't care too much what it looks like. What I'm after though is a color that I can use. I'm actually probably going to sample a color from the image just to try and get something a little bit more organic from the image. I'm thinking this brownish color would be nice. I've got it set to multiply blend mode, and I don't care much about the other settings. The only thing I really care about is the fluffiness of the shadow. If I don't want it to be quite so harsh, I can make it a little bit fluffier. But distances immaterial at this stage spread might just want to again use that to adjust just how harsh the shadow is. I'm going to click OK. Now obviously this bear would not throw a shadow that look anything like this in real life. What we want to do is we want to type the shadow that we've just created which is in a bear shape. We want to go and do something with it. I'm going to right-click on this drop shadow icon here. I'm going to select create layer. I've got a warning message here. I'm just going to click OK. What that does is it extracts the shadow to its own layer. We've got a layer here that is a bear shadow. Let's go and do something with it. Well, we want the shadow to come from the bottom of the bear. I'm actually going to pull it down and distort it so that it sits underneath the bear. I'm going to rotate it a bit. Now at this stage, it's looking reasonably okay except that this should really be attached to this foot. I'm going to with the shadow selected to choose Edit, and then Transform warp. I can use the Warp tools to just warp this shadow, so I bring the feet up of the shadow to connect with the face of the bear. That's really all I wanted to do here. But you can use this to tweak your shadow a little bit. Let's click the check mark. Now with our shadow in place, you can see that it's just as dark, close to the bear as it is away from the bear. I want to mask this so I can soften the edge. I'm going to my Shadow layer. This is the one that just contains the shadow, and I'm going to click the Mask icon. I'm going to add a white filled layer mask. Now will go to the Gradient tool. The third gradient is always a black to white gradient. You just click on the black to white gradient. Let's just click away. I've got my mask selected. You can see it's got little handles around it. I'm definitely drawing on the mask. I'm just going to drag a gradient over my shadow. Now by luck I had my gradient selected correctly and reverse was not enabled. If your gradient goes in the otherwise so let's just say what might happen. Let's just turn reverse on. If your gradient ends up looking like this, where you've got the shadow the wrong way, all you want to do is undo that, and click the reverse option because you want to reverse the gradient. It goes in the other direction and just following the line of the shadow here. Just to soften this off a little bit. You can keep trying until you get a really good result. There is our bear filled with landscape. Now he has a realistic shadow. All we have to do next is to polish him off. I would like to say a little bit more of the bear features in this image so we're going to go and do just that in the next video. 5. Double Exposure Effect Part 4: We can say how we're doing here. I'm going to add a layer in at the very bottom of the last arc. I'm going to hold the control or command key as I click here on the new layer icon, that just adds a layer at the very back. I have white as my background color so I can press "Control Backspace". That would be command delete on the Mac just to fill the background with white. Think I want to bring in a different background in a minute, but let's concentrate on the bear's face at this point. Now, we saved a copy of the bear. Here it is. here. It's already been isolated, but it is a spare copy of our bear. I'm going to take this layer and put it right up at the very top of the last stack and I'm going to turn its visibility on. What that does is it gives us our bear back. We want to blend this into the image underneath. Now you'll need to, depending on the image you're using, experiment with these blend modes. If you own a Mac, before you do this, just go and select something like the rectangular marquee tool. Then you'll click on the layer blends here, making sure of course that you have this bear layer selected and select the first of your blend modes. On a Mac, you'll press "Shift plus" or "Shift minus" to go through your blend modes. On a PC, you can just press the down arrow key. As you're going through, you're looking at something, some blend mode that is going to help you bring the bear details back into this image. Now, lighting is one of those blend modes, so it's screen for this particular image. But I'm actually headed down here because I like the effect that I get with pin light. I'm thinking that pin light might work a little bit for this image so I can get some lighter areas. But you're just going to go and experiment and see where you can get some of the bear detail to appear back in the image, and you're going to settle for that particular blend mode. I'm going to do pin light here. But what I want to do is I want to block everything out. I don't want any of the bear image to be appearing right now. I'm going to these masks. I'm making sure I have my mask selected. I have black as my foreground color. I'm going to press "Alt Backspace" option delete on the Mac to fill this mask with black. Now I've hidden the bear away. I've got this bear up here, but I've totally hidden him away. I'm going to go next to the brush tool and I want a soft round brush. I'm going to select a brush here with zero hardness, maybe just a little bit of hardness. Now, the size I can adjust as I go using the open and closed square bracket case. I'm going to dial down the opacity on this brush. I'm going to have a painting at about 30 percent opacity. I'm going to make sure I have the mask selected and I'm going to make white my foreground color. I'm going to start painting on the mask here. As I paint on the mask, you can see that I'm bringing back details of the bear underneath. I want to bring back enough recognizable details into the bear's face. It's just going to improve the quality of the entire image. Now, because of the work that I'm doing, because it's on a mask, on an original image. I can also experiment with different blend modes even at this stage. Of course, if you're working on the Mac, you want to get away from the brush tool before you start doing this. Let's go down to lighten our screen. Say lighten our screen and if you like this effect, but it's too light, well, you can just dial down the opacity on this layer to blend these two layers together. At this stage, what you want to be doing is going around the bear, particularly in the facial area and just adjust it to bring back just the little bit of detail into the image. To finish off the bear image you may want to bring in a background to use. Now, I also found another image at unsplash.com. It's got a few man-made features in it, but it's going to work pretty well as a background. I'm going to right-click and choose duplicate layer and again, I'm going to send this to my Grizzly Adams image and click, "Okay". Going back into my image, and I'm going to drag the thing I want to use as my background, down to make it the second to bottom layer. I want it above the white background. Now, it's obviously a lot too light, but also the color in this image behind does not match the color in the grizzly bear. But we can do something about that. First of all, I want to see where my tree image is and my tree image is this background image here. I'm actually going to rename that. I'm going to rename it trees because it's going to be easier to pick up that image in a minute if I have it named. I'm going back to this background layer, this white snow scene and I'm going to select that layer and choose image adjustments, match color. This is a really handy tool for when you want to match the color into images. We're going to affect the snow scene and we're going to re-color it slightly to give us more of the colors that are in the bear. We want to go down to source and we want to select Grizzly Adams as, a source and for our layer, we want to go ahead and select at trees layer. That was why it was important to name this layer so it's easy to find. Now, we've just done match color and it's worked, but it's gone totally overboard. But that's fine because we got a whole heap of sliders here and what we're going to do is just fade in this effect. What we really wanted to do here is to borrow a little bit of the green, of the trees here to color this, what was a very blue image. The snow scene, here is very blue and we've just added a little bit of subtle color to it that helps blend the bear into his background. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now, this image, it still needs work. I'm going to the move tool, I'm just going to move this up so that the rocks and things are a little bit closer under the bear's feet here. I'm also going to go to the shadow image and for this I'm going to decrease the opacity on the shadow image a lot. It's just blending in. I'm going to go back to this background and I'm going to apply an adjustment to it. I'm going to apply a levels adjustment. With this select, I'm going to choose Image adjustments and then levels. Now, the beauty of the levels adjustment is that it allows you to lighten or darken the image. If we want to lighten the image, we can just drag in on this white slider. That's going to lighten the image quite a bit and I think it does make quite a bit of lightening here. But we can also lighten the darker areas of the image, and we do that using output levels. This is a selection that you very seldom use. But output levels allows you to lighten the darker areas of the image. You can see that these rocks here are now lightening up quite a bit. We're taking some of the focus away from the scenery and putting it back onto the bear. Here we have a lightening or darkening option in the mid-tones. You can just drag this mid-tone slider either to the left or the right to just improve this image. Now I'm concerned about those posts, but I'm going to deal with those in just a minute. Let's click, "Okay". I'm going to press "Control Zero" to get back to my sizing handles and I just think this image needs a bit of re-sizing. I'm going to hold the shift key as I re-size it. As I do this, I get a chance to put the poles behind the bear. I can just bring this in quite a bit and click the check mark and let's go control or command zero to get back in. Actually that's not getting me close enough to my image, so that's just use the zoom tool. Now, at this point you can determine whether or not you even want to use the background. You don't have to use it, you may prefer not to. You can also tweak the effect. Now, I'm a little unhappy about the bear's face. I actually think that the pin light effect is going to be better on this image and possibly with a higher opacity value. In fact, it's pretty good but not quite intense enough. I'm actually going to double this up. I'm going to take this layer, add it to the new layer icon to give me a double intensity. This is without that effect, and this is with that intense pin light effect and I think it actually works better for the image. Choose the background or not, as you wish. You've got all these images that you can download and use and follow along. Or you can go and choose your own images to use. If you're being kind to yourself, go and find something that's going to be really easy to isolate. Otherwise, you're going to spend a lot of time making your selections. Your project for this class is to find something, an animal or some recognizable item to create as a silhouette and fill it with an image that is indicative of that animal or that item's location. Or something that is relevant to it and then bring back some details using some blend mode on a duplicate of the image. Post your finished project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and I want to thank the person who actually asked me to create a class on an effect like this. Because I think it's a wonderful idea for a class. As you're working through these videos, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.