Photo Fun | Double Exposures

I am absolutely not a professional photographer. I wish that I was! I wish that I had the equipment of one as well. I am just a lowly stay at home mom, but thanks to my love of digital scrapbooking and memory keeping, taking better photos and having fun with photo editing has become a little hobby of mine. I thought maybe every now and again I would share some photo fun tips, techniques or tutorials. Sometimes these will be small things like a photo idea. Other times they might be an editing technique (like today!). All in all, I hope you enjoy them or they are a little bit helpful or inspire you to try some new things! I really want to encourage everyone who might come across this to take some time and document your memories with photos or stories or even both!

During the Month of Challenges @ The Lilypad in January, one of the challenges was to create a double exposure photograph and create a page with that. I had never thought about, tried or even really noticed this technique before then. HERE is the link to the challenge. I do not know how long it will be up but it has some super great info from my fellow Polly Farrah about doing double exposures! I thought that I would walk you through how I did my own. Which layer styles I used and all that jazz.

I have always loved this photo of Stella. On it's own it has a beautiful and lovely ethereal feel. Plus she is quite stunning, if I do say so myself! Once I had decided what I wanted to do for the challenge, I just knew this photo was going to be perfect. One of the tips Farrah had given was to use a profile, or person for one of your photos. After browsing pinterest, I knew that I wanted a greenery picture for on top. It just was going to be the best bet for a good pic blended in.

Here are my two original photos completely unedited.

After playing around a little bit, I decided I wanted it to look a little dramatic and so I changed the photo of Stella to black and white and edited the flowers just a wee bit to boost the colors. Nothing drastic. Just a quick action (almost all of the actions I use are by Sarah Cornish of My 4 Hens Photography). The particular ones I used were from the "Fable" set. I was going to link you but it looks like they might be retired. BOO! She has so many other great ones though!

The lighting of the original photos was pretty spot on (for what I like..photography is so subjective!) so I seriously just ran the actions and left them as is with no tweaking. Then I layered the flowers on top of my photo of Stella. I did not like the look of the leaves and things on top of her though. So I took a very soft brush and just erased the shape of her from the flower picture.

click to make larger

You can see in my layers palette how I have just erased on the flower image. That way she was in focus. You can also see that the flowers are not that vibrant. So I duplicate them and go from there. The key to this next part is just playing with the blend modes. In the screen shot above you can see where it says "vivid light" above my layers. There are sooooo many different blend modes and everyone likes different things, so this is just a matter of playing with them and playing with the opacity, which can be seen right next to the blend modes. I turned my top layer on to "soft light" because I already knew that would be a nice subtle hint of colors without being too over powering. With both layers at 100% opacity, it was too strong and the colors were almost neon which isn't quite as dramatic as I was wanting. In the end I went with 60% on the soft light top layer and 40% with the vivid light bottom layer of flowers.

Since the challenge was to create a page with your photo, I thought I would share that here with you as well in case you want to see.

Click for full credits

I went for a little bit of an artsy look here and used elements that would draw out the colors of the flowers on my photo.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a peek! I hope you feel inspired to trying out some double exposures. There are even apps for doing this with your photo photos! It was quite daunting when I first read the challenge and went looking for inspiration, but it was so fun and I can't wait to try it again!