Editing Portrait Images

After capturing my first set of self portrait images I then went through them and picked out which images I thought of as my best in terms of compositions and lighting. I also then went through my personal photography work from the past and chose some interesting images that I thought would express who I was but also images that used interesting shapes and colours. These would be my images to layer with each portrait. I then went on to edit these in Photoshop using layering techniques to create the double exposure effects that I had been looking into. Here is the process that I went through with each image:

Step 1:

I imported my chosen portrait into Photoshop as my first background layer.

Step 2:

I then decided to crop my image down to frame it better and help the composition.

Step 3:

I then imported the image that I wanted to blend it with as a new layer so that it sits on top.

Step 4:

I then right clicked on the tab for this top layer in the bottom right of the screen. This then brought up the layer options and I clicked Rasterize Layer which means I can now edit that layer a lot more.

Step 5:

I then changed the opacity of this top layer using the opacity slider which again is located at the bottom right corner next to the layer tabs. I put the opacity down enough so that I could see both images as clearly as possible.

Step 6:

I then clicked on the free transform option found under the image option menu. This then aloud to me position, rotate and change the scale of this top image. Having the opacity at about 50% also aloud me to be able to see the best way to make it sit well with my face shapes. I pressed enter when I was happy to finalise the positioning.

Step 7:

Next I began to play with blending and merging effects. These effects are again in the bottom right corner by the layer tabs. Next to the opacity slider there is a menu with lots of different effects to use which begins off just as normal. I then scrolled through these till I found one which was the most effective. For this particular image I used the overlay option from this menu however it depends completely on the image as to which one works best.

Step 8:

I then used a very soft eraser tool to begin carefully rubbing out all the areas of the layered image which fell on the background and not on my skin. This was very difficult around the hair but using such a soft eraser did make this easier as its much more forgiving.

step 9:

Once I had finished erasing the background I then went on to observing the image layered on top checking I was happy with everything. For example in this image of the owl there was a hand in the shop which was very distracting on my arm so I used the dodge toll to remove this and make it more trees.

step 10:

I then selected the background layer and went into image options and clicked on adjustments which allowed me to play around with the levels such as brightness and contrast. This is so I can try optimize the image to best show off the layers in a way so that they blend but still contrast.

Step 11:

I also experimented by seeing what the images looked like in back and white. I did this by going back onto the image menu and clicking adjustments then black and white. It then brought up a menu where I could then customised the black and white effect I wanted through each colour channel. I had to do this for each layer one at a time.

Step 12:

I then had a go at trying to whiten the background up rather than it looking grey. I did this by using a very soft paintbrush and using a off white tone so that it was whitened but not too obviously.

This process is used through out each edit however all the settings and options required are different for each image as they all have different values and I also wanted to create different effects for each one.