From the course: Using Lightroom and Photoshop Together

Making a double exposure

From the course: Using Lightroom and Photoshop Together

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Making a double exposure

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- [Instructor] Making a double exposure is basically making a composite of multiple images. Whenever you want to make a composite of photos that are in your Lightroom catalog, you'll need to pass them over to Photoshop because that's something you can only do in Photoshop. In this lesson, we'll practice doing that and we'll make a really creative composite too. Start in Lightroom Classic, selecting these two images, and then go up to Photo, Edit in, and choose Open as Layers in Photoshop. Here in Photoshop, we have two different images of a portrait, this one and this one, each on its own layer. Go to the top layer, find a blank portion of that layer, and double click to open up the Layer Style dialog box. I'll move that over so you can see more of the portrait. Go to the Advanced Blending section of this window, and there, uncheck Channels R, and you're done. No, really, you're almost done with this composite. This is a special effect that you can get by turning channels on and off here in advanced blending mode. Experiment a little with different combinations of channels. So, for example, we can get this if we turn off the green channel. Or, if we turn on the red channel, we get this. I'm going to go back to green and blue on, and red off, for this red on aqua look. And then I'm going to click OK and close the Layer Style dialog box. Now you can move and edit the two photos to get just the look you like. For example, I'm going to click on the bottom layer. I'll get the Move tool in the toolbar. I'm going to uncheck Auto Select Layer, and I'll go back to the Layers panel and click on the bottom layer, and I'm going to drag that over to the left a little bit. I'm also going to crop away this area on the right, so I'll get the Crop tool. Then I'll drag in, and maybe I'll crop a little over on this side too. I'd also like to lighten the blue part of this composite. So, with the bottom layer selected, that's the layer that has the blue photo in the image, I'll go down to the bottom of the Layers panel and I'll click the Create New Adjustment Layer button, and I'll choose Levels. And here, I'm going to drag the gray slider to the left to lighten the bottom layer. Then I'm going to click on the top layer, which contains the red photo, I'll go back down and I'll create a new adjustment layer, this one a hue/saturation adjustment layer. I'd like to reduce the saturation of the reds a little, so I'll go to this menu and choose Reds, and then I'm going to take the saturation slider and drag it to the left. So this is desaturating just the range of red colors in one of the images in this double exposure. There's a lot more that you can do to your own version of this. Have fun and explore. When you're done, go to the File menu and choose Save. Back in Lightroom Classic, you can see that we now have not only the two component images but also our double exposure.

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