Today we will be going through the steps of my take on a double exposure.
I decided on the images for a few reasons, my biggest passion is cars and racing. The car shown is called the Hoonicorn, it’s a 1400hp all wheel drive 1965 mustang custom built for the infomous Ken Block. it’s a marvel not just for racing but for any car builder as well. There is so much custom work on this car that in an interview they mentioned the only thing left of the original car is the pillars holding the roof, as someone who loves working on cars and customizing them I knew that I wanted to use it in at least one of my projects. the picture I used of myself is one taken a few years back and the reason I chose it is because at the time of the picture I was actually about to start a race, albeit a go-kart race but a race none the less, so I thought It fit really nicely with the theme (and it’s also the nicest side profile picture that I have). I went with the double exposure because it allowed me to represent a very literal sense of self portrait with something that means a lot to me. without further adieu, let’s dive in.
These are the pictures I used but you can use which ever ones you like the steps will be the same for the most part, you just want to make sure that one is of you and the second is of something that connects to you and your identity, for example my second picture is of a racing car because I have a deep passion for cars and racing. Fair warning: A lot of it is going to be subjective, I will provide the settings I used but I strongly encourage you to play around with some of them to see what works best.
Open both images in Photoshop. Go to the picture of you and we’ll make it black and white by going to Image> Adjustments > Desaturate.
Next, go to the image of the car. The first thing I did here was flip the car image because I wanted it to be more uniform and face the same direction I was. You can do the same by going to image> Image rotation> flip canvas horizontally (you can flip yours vertically if you want, no judgement here). Next you’ll want to grab the rectangular marquee tool (M) to select the entire image and copy (crtl+C for pc command+C for mac)
And then head over to the document of the picture of you and paste (crtl+V or command+V). Once you have both pictures in the same document resize and position the picture of the car (or whatever it is that you picked) the easiest way to do this is to change the opacity to 50% for more visibility and then going to Edit > Free transform and resize to your liking, you can hold down shift while dragging the corners so that the ratio of the picture stays the same. This way you don’t have to worry about it being stretched when you finish resizing, just remember to set the opacity back to 100% once you’re done.
Next we’ll be moving the picture of yourself to the top most layer. You can do this by going over to the layers menu and clicking on the lock icon to unlock the layer when the menu pops up just hit okay, and then simply drag the layer to the top
While we have the layer of you selected we will change the blending mode by hitting the arrow key to bring down the menu that’s right next to the opacity setting, right now it will say “normal.” Play around with all of the modes to see which one you like best, for the tutorial I went with “Hard light”
Select the bottom layer (the picture of the car in this case) then go to the very bottom of the layer menu and select “add layer mask” here we’ll hide parts of the car picture that we don’t like without erasing any of it. Make sure your foreground is set to black and paint away I set mine so the car is only on my face and nowhere else if you accidentally hide something that you didn’t mean to, all you have to do is set the foreground to white and paint over that part and it will reveal that part of the image again. Once this is done we’ll play around with the levels to make it pop a little. Select the layer of you again, go to Image> Adjustments > Levels. Here you’ll want to play around with the settings a bit to see what you like best. The settings I used are below. You can slide the black, gray, and white arrows left and right to adjust it instead of typing random numbers, the further right you move the black arrow the darker the blacks become and the further left you move the white arrow the lighter the whites become. Once done just hit OK
Next I desaturated the car pic a little bit but you can leave yours with color if you want. First select the picture of the car, Since we aren’t fully desaturating the picture this time you’ll want to go to Image > Adjustment > Hue and saturation. And move the middle slider to the left until you’re at a spot you’re comfortable with. I set mine to -70
If you aren’t happy with where your image is (like I was when I got this far) there is still a way you can move it, if you look in the layers menu you will see the layer with the car picture has a chain between the layer and the mask. You can click it to unchain it, this will make it so that you can move the picture around while still only showing what’s on your face, just make sure you select the actual picture layer before moving anything or it will move the mask instead, once you’ve made sure the layer is what is selected you can move it by either using the free transform tool or by holding ctrl and dragging (command dragging) to where you like it.
Last thing you can do is remove any harsh transitions by selecting the mask, select black as your foreground set the brush size to 500 with a hardness of 0% by clicking on the menu drop down next to the current brush selected. Then with this huge brush use only the edge to start hiding, no part of the car should be inside the circle of the brush, you just use the outside of the brush to do some light blending for you, if it’s erasing too much try having the brush further away. Depending on the resolution of the pictures you selected you may need an even bigger brush. Once you feel comfortable with the blending you’re all done!
