Quick Photography Tips

In this tip we’ll look at a method for producing a double exposure effect in Photoshop. When you take a double exposure in film photography, the results are usually a little bit unpredictable. With Photoshop you have much more control over how the final double exposed image turns out.

Here are our two images that we’ll merge into one double exposure (both of the London Eye and taken by bortescristian)…

The first thing to do is to get the two images into one workspace in Photoshop. Open the two images and copy and paste one into the other as a new layer (it doesn’t matter which one you copy across).

The next step is to select the top layer (the one you’ve just pasted in) and change its blending mode to screen. This lets the layer below show through and gives us our first look at our double exposure. At this point you may want to move the layers relative to each other to line up certain elements from the two images. In this case the focal elements of the two images do not interfere with each other when one is superimposed on the other so I don’t need to move anything. Here’s what the image looks like now:

As you can see, because we’ve added the two images together the result is a bit brighter than we’d like. To return the image to a less washed out look, add a Levels adjustment layer above the two layers. When the Levels dialogue opens you’ll see that the histogram of the image is all shifted towards the white end (the right hand side). To correct the over-exposure that’s resulted from combining these two images, I’ve dragged the black pointer under the histogram up to the point where the histogram stops being zero values. The amount of adjustment you make at this point will vary depending on the images you started with and the results you’re looking for.

Here’s the final image…

Double exposures of the same subject at different zoom levels such as in this example can be quite effective but a juxtaposition of two different subjects can also work well.

For some multiple exposure inspiration from the film photography world, check out this Flickr group.

If you are a Flickr user and produce some nice results with this tutorial, please post them to the Quick Photography Tips Flickr Group.