From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Portrait project: Exposure composite - iPhone Tutorial

From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

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Portrait project: Exposure composite

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- Hey, everybody, Sean here. Today we're gonna have a continuation of last week's episode. In that episode, I set up a portrait shot against a white backdrop. The reason I chose a white backdrop is I wanted to make a double exposure portrait. I knew that I would be able to take that picture and bring it into a compositing app, and use a blending mode to make that white background totally disappear, and have a quick and easy blend. Now, the app I'm gonna use is called Union. It's made by Pixite. It's an iOS app, but you can do this in any app that allows you to blend multiple pictures together with blending modes. So, for instance, Snapseed, you can do this, and Photoshop Mix. Both of those are available for either iOS or Android. I already have my background picture placed in here, and I'm gonna tap this little button of three lines in the upper left to go in and place a foreground. I'm just gonna the plus button, there, and then tap on the photo. Let's get this shot, here. I've already made this black and white and lightened it up a little bit, and I'm gonna just scale this up a little bit, here, and I'm gonna set the blending modes. Down here at the bottom, it's already set to normal. I'm gonna choose multiply, and you can see that the white background totally disappears. It's just magical. Now, if you had shot this a different way, against a black background, and you wanted the light areas to show, but hide the dark, you would go and choose a blend mode called screen. If I had a black background, it would totally disappear, there. Now, in some scenarios, this particular look might look interesting, but for our purposes, I'm gonna set this back to multiply. It's almost done, really. I'm just gonna move this around a little bit and scale this up, and position that right about there. I like the way that the tree line is an extension of his mustache, there. That's really trendy these days, tree line mustaches. That looks pretty good. I think what I'm gonna do is add a gradient mask in here, and I also noticed that there's a little bit of darkness on this side here from the original backdrop, which I need to deal with. If we look up here in the upper left corner, you can see those three lines, it always shows you which layer is active, there. The bottom layer is the background, the middle layer is the foreground, and the top is the mask. Let's go and add a mask in there. I'm gonna add a shape mask to start out with. It's already selected a gradient mask, a linear gradient. Let me just make this a little bit smaller so you can see what it looks like. It's just basically a graphic in there of a gradient. I'm gonna scale this up a little bit bigger, here, and put this on the side, just something like that to fade out the side of his head, there. Now what I'm gonna do is tap this little eraser button right down here to go into my brush masking mode. When you do that, you have to basically commit to the position of the gradient mask. That's fine. Now I'm just gonna make sure I have a decent-sized brush and the opacity is set to 100%. I'm already set to erase, here, so I can come in here and just erase that dark part right there. That's all there is to it. It really is a simple process if you set it up right from the start by photographing your subject against a white or very light backdrop, or a black or very dark backdrop. Check it out.

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