How To Create a Double Exposure Effect in GIMP

today i want to show you how to create this double exposure in if you're ready let's do it the first thing we're going to do is create a new document here are the dimensions 4000 for the width 2250 for the height and then under the advanced options we're going to fill with the foreground color which is this color right here so click on your foreground color swatch here to get your change foreground color and type in this hexadecimal right here go ahead and click ok to create your new document now we have three images for this double exposure and you can find the images via the links in the description below so go ahead and download those images find them select all of them click and drag them over your document and they'll be added as new layers and pretty cool all right let's go ahead and turn off this layer and this layer we're going to rename this original let's call this one mountains and this one will be clouds make sure original is selected grab your move tool with the letter m and let's move our model over here to the bottom right so right about there should be good all right so the first thing i want to do is i want to make a selection of our model so we can remove the background now the best tool for the job is our foreground select tool which you can find right here i'm gonna go ahead and increase this interface here all right so there's a couple of steps for using the foreground select tool and i'm not going to go into great detail because i have another tutorial that shows you how to use all the different options for the foreground selection tool which you can find in the description below i'll have a link in there for you so for those of you that don't know how to use it the first step you have to take is make an initial outline around your model or your subject and it doesn't have to be perfect because in step two we're going to further refine the area that needs to be selected now we have some stray hairs here that i do not want included in the selection so i'm going to go ahead and get in real close to our neck there to eliminate that as part of the selection so i'm going to continue going all the way around and then go back to the beginning once you see that little yellow circle release your mouse button click enter or return and you'll be entered into step two which includes automatically selecting your brush and applying this blue overlay now you can see the area of the outline that we created is a lighter shade of blue what we need to do now is paint on the inside of our model again creating an outline and that's going to remove the overlay which is going to help decide on the colors and the contrast and the textures to include in your selection so i'm going to go ahead and go around the model like so again it doesn't have to be perfect once you get back to the beginning go ahead and release your mouse button and then that layer mask is removed or i should say that color overlay is removed i'm going to go with a larger brush now so i can paint on the inside and remove the overlay from this area as well i just want to give some more colors to consider for the selection process let's go ahead and hit enter or return is going to do its calculation based on the information and the colors that you gave it and it's going to fine-tune that overlay to the edges of our model that let's go ahead and click enter or return to make our selection we're going to come over here and click on this little clown icon to add a layer mask via a selection go ahead and click add and boom your background is gone how cool is that i love it now i love using layer masks in this way because maybe didn't do a perfect job in our selection process we can actually use the layer mask to add or remove the pixels as needed but as you can see did a pretty good job let's say it didn't let's say these stray hairs right here are too much or we want to remove them or reduce them because we don't want them included in our image let's go ahead and deselect with command or control shift plus a now with our layer mask selected what we can do is grab our paint brush tool and paint with black or white to add or remove the pixels as needed now we're not actually removing those pixels permanently we're actually hiding the pixels temporarily and then we can re-show them if we made a mistake so if i zoom in here we can actually see part of our neck is kind of transparent more so than in other areas so we didn't do a very good job in the selection process here but that's okay let's grab our paint brush tool and come over here click right here to change your foreground color to black and then we can hide those pixels that we don't want included in that layer now if i switch my foreground color to white by clicking on these arrows or pressing the letter x i can then come in here and paint back the pixels or re-show those pixels that were hidden before so if i come over here and begin painting it's going to begin adding that background back in but press the letter x to switch to black and you can remove or hide those pixels i should say so they're not included okay let's zoom all the way back out with command or control shift plus j now the other thing i want to mention is i have another tutorial that will show you seven different ways to remove a background in make sure you check out that tutorial it's in the description below as well let's go ahead and go up to layer now and increase the boundary size of the layer which is restricted by this green outline right here click on layer to image size to increase that to the canvas size which is going to give us more freedom and control over this layer instead of being restricted to the inside of that layer boundary now what i want to do next is i want to duplicate this layer i'm going to turn off the original and i'm going to call this one black and white because we're going to convert this to black and white by desaturating the layer but first you need to make sure you have your image layer selected if you take a look at your layer mask here i just clicked on it again you can see this white outline right here that means the layer mask is selected any edits that we apply to it are not going to be applied to this image layer or these pixels here so these are the pixels these are showing or hiding the pixels all right let's go up to colors desaturate and click on desaturate to well desaturate the image all right so the next thing i want to do is i want to increase the contrast a little bit because our model is a little bit flat the lighting is a little flat so what we can do is we can darken the shadows and brighten the highlights and that's going to add contrast so we're going to go up to colors and select curves and we have our shadows over here on the left i'm going to go ahead and move this over and if we click on our linear line here and drag down that makes the shadows darker that's too much so let's go back up and over here we have our highlights so that makes the highlights brighter so we want a little s curve which gives us the contrast that we need all right let's turn our mountains back on and we're actually going to go ahead and move that all the way up to the top we're going to resize the mountains and we're going to place the sun on our eyes so it looks like the rays are coming out of our eyes kind of hard to do right now because we can't see our model below the mountains so what we're going to do is drop the opacity of the mountains we're going to grab our scale tool which is right here we're going to click on this layer and we're going to click on the side here and drag it to the left all the way to the edge right there now we have a white square right here in the center if you hover over it it turns yellow once it's yellow you can then click on the inside and move it into position so i'm going to place it right about there should be good click enter or return to resize and move the layer okay let's put this back to 100 all right so the next thing i want to do is i want to take our mountains and place it inside of our model so we're going to right click on our black and white layer and select mask to selection and that creates a selection around our model make sure your mountains layer is selected we're going to create a new layer mask via a selection again click add and boom our mountains are now inside our model all right let's deselect with command or control shift plus a all right now the fun begins because we're going to now begin painting on our layer masks to control the visibility of the pixels of the mountain so we're going to hide the mountain in certain areas and we're going to show the mountain in other areas so the first thing i want to do is grab my brush with the letter p and then in the tool options i want to bring my hardness here from 50 which is the default all the way down to zero that's going to create a very very soft edged brush but i think it works great for this particular project now make sure you have black selected for your foreground color let's create a very large brush and then when you paint in that area that you want to remove it's going to begin hiding those pixels of the mountain and revealing our model below so i'm going to go ahead and remove the mountain all the way up here and the sky i'm going to go with a smaller brush because i don't want to remove these peaks in the mountain i just want to bring back our model in that area all right so the next thing i want to do is a little tricky because what i want to do is i want to remove the mountains but i want to keep the sun rays and we can do that we can paint with black in here but i don't think it looks really good does it i'm going to undo that with command or control plus z so instead here's a pro tip we're going to paint with an opacity of around 40 to 50. so this is the opacity of your brush now instead of removing or hiding the pixels completely it's only going to lower the opacity of it down to this level so it's going to show the pixels at a lighter value now i can paint inside of the rays here and remove the mountains and keep the rays at the same time i'm gonna go with the smaller brush now and do this side here now the thing is this is not going to be perfect from the get-go and that's because as we continue adding or stacking more layers as we work on this project it's going to alter how this layer looks so you may need to come back at a later time and adjust the layer mask so it looks the way you want it to i'm going to go ahead and lower the opacity down even more i'm going to go with the lower brush and i'm going to paint in this area just to blend it in a little bit more now i can go back and paint with white by switching the foreground color to white and then i can paint in the rays in case i remove them too much so again i'm just using a smaller amount of opacity to slowly paint those rays back in and then of course you can paint with black again until you get the results you want now you can continue going back and forth till eternity and that's why i don't recommend trying to get this perfect right now until you have the other layers stacked accordingly so let's go ahead and move on by adding the mountains to this side of the canvas let's go up to layer and select layer to image size to change that layer boundary size and we're going to paint with white so switch to white increase the opacity and then just paint along the edge right here so i just want to remove the outline of our model pretty much so something like that now what i want to do is i want to lower that opacity again and continue painting the mountain back in at a smaller amount so basically we're fading the mountain back in from lighter to darker now we can go with the lower opacity again continue adding some mountains back in whatever works for you now i have a hard edged here because that was the end of the image originally so now we can paint with black to begin removing that i'm going to increase the opacity though so we can get rid of that a little bit quicker i also want to remove the sky and some of this area here okay back to a lower opacity and a large brush so i can begin painting in this area here because there's kind of an edge here between the different opacity levels that i used now she is starting to show through we can see her shoulder here and her hair here that we need to remove so we're going to go back to white to paint out that area or areas i don't want her shoulder in this so i'm going to go ahead and remove it i'm going to use a large brush here so i can paint that in or remove the hair i should say like so and painting from left to right to blend it all in all right we now need to remove the sky and we can do that with our brush when we paint with black of course but another way to do it is to make a selection of your sky so i'm going to use my fuzzy select tool to make a selection but first make sure your mountain image layer is selected click in the sky area and drag down now i have a pink overlay because i have my draw mask turned on in the tool options now i have another tutorial that goes into great detail on how to use the fuzzy select tool to remove your backgrounds in this manner so make sure you check that out the link is in the description below so i'm going to continue dragging this down until i have everything selected that i need selected and then we need to make sure our layer mask is selected our background color is set to black and then hit your delete key to remove the background okay ctrl shift a to deselect so the next thing i want to do is i want to lower the saturation of this layer and i don't want it completely black and white i want a little color so that's why i'm desaturating a little but i also want to work non-destructively in case i change my mind later on so i'm going to do that by duplicating this layer right clicking on it and applying the layer mask and then under colors we can go ahead and desaturate again now to bring some of that color back all we have to do is adjust the opacity and this gives you the flexibility to change your mind later on versus applying that desaturation directly on that layer all right let's work on our clouds now let's go ahead and turn that layer on click and drag it all the way up to the top let's grab our scale tool because we need to make those clouds larger i'm going to grab each side here and make them larger we also need to lower that opacity so we can see what's going on underneath i want the clouds to look like they're coming out of our head so i'm going to go ahead and move these clouds into position and i think that size is looking pretty good let's go ahead and hit enter or return and we have a good start now we need to remove these clouds down here and the blue part of the sky so i'm going to grab my fuzzy select tool and i'm going to click and drag down to get the selection that i want now it's not going to select everything that i want to remove it's not going to select this down here but that's fine we'll get to that in just a second i have a little piece right here that i want to add so i'm going to hold down my shift key and click right there all right let's add a layer mask we're going to click right here again make sure you have selection and we want to make sure we have invert mask turned on so make sure you do that and click add to remove that blue part of the sky let's deselect and then with our brush tool we're going to make a very large brush we're going to make sure our opacity is at 100 and then we can remove this area fairly quickly okay i'm going to go with a smaller brush now because i want to remove the clouds in front of the mountain and on her face and i don't necessarily need all the clouds anyways so i'm just going to go ahead and continue removing clouds until i'm happy with the final look alright so at this point you're probably saying that looks horrible and you're right so we have a couple more steps to blend in this layer with the others the first thing i want to do is i want to desaturate the layers but we can't do that until we have that image layer selected here so now that the pixels are selected we can go ahead and desaturate all right so that helped but check this out we're going to go up to mode and change it to overlay and boom oh that looks so much better wouldn't you agree all right so the other thing i'm not liking right now is her head right here we need to blend that in with the clouds so the clouds look like they're coming out of our head so we're going to go ahead and grab our brush tool and paint with black and we want to make sure that the opacity is set to a lower amount and we need to make sure we have the correct layer mask selected which is our model here and then i can begin painting over that area to remove her hair and to show those clouds a little bit more so each time you paint over that area it's going to bring that opacity of that layer mask lower and lower and then the clouds will show through more every time you make a new path now you have to release your mouse button to continue applying another level of opacity or transparency now i think i have some of the sky of the mountain here again so this is why going back and forth on your layer mask is going to be needed because you're not like i said you're not going to get it perfect the first time through and you're going to have to go back and make adjustments to it to get the final edit that you want for your project you can always turn off your layers here to see if maybe it's something else and it's this layer here that's actually causing the problems now so i'm going to go ahead and put on a white layer mask make sure you have invert mask turned off and then i can paint away in that area to get rid of that part of the mountain all right one more step to make this image look even better and that's to colorize our model so in my initial project here i colorized her a little bit to bring back a little color she looks good in black and white but i think she looks better in color not a lot of color just a little so let me show you how i did that and we're going to grab our original layer we're going to duplicate it click drag it all the way up to the top turn it on we're going to go ahead and right click and select apply layer mask then we're going to drop the opacity down to around 50 and we're going to change the mode to let's do overlay pretty cool all right one more thing we need to add our white layer mask again so we can paint with black to remove her from this part of the image how cool is that i love it all right i hope you enjoyed this double exposure special effects tutorial for more special effect tutorials check out that playlist right there

Channel: Parker Photographic

Views: 1,821

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, double exposure, gimp double exposure, gimp double exposure tutorial, gimp special effects, gimp double exposure effect, gimp photo manipulation

Id: CwIve6VkMis

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021