create "double exposure"?

[KSP1139]

I recently shot a wedding and was ask to make a photo that had the front of the church and the couple inside the church kissing. The couple had seen an image from a friends wedding. The way they described the image it was like a double exposure. I am using Photoshop 7 and have not done this before. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated:oops:

Thank You in advance.

[ssim]

This is a process of blending one image into another. We used to do this with film by exposing to shots on the same frame of film but photoshop has made it alot easier in most cases.

You need to do some research on blending one image into another. It can be a little undaunting the first time you try but it becomes easier as time goes on. Here are a couple of quick resources so that you can understand the concept.

Link 1 (http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/blend/blend.html)
Link 2 (http://www.heathrowe.com/tuts/blending.asp)

There are lots of photoshop resources on the net that will assist you in this. The other option is to invest in a photoshop book. Most books you will find in the stores are for the creative suites. You might have to resort to a second hand store or the internet to find a copy that is specific to photoshop 7.

[DrPablo]

I find "double exposures" in PS about 1000 times harder than doing it on film, and multiple (> 2) exposures yet harder. I've done many multiple exposures in both media. PS gives you many more options for combining layers and separate photos, of course, but it's far far harder for what we think of as a classic double exposure.

The reason it's so much harder in PS is mainly due to difficulties in aggregating light intensity from two separate, complete shots, after the analog:digital conversion has taken place. On film you merely collect exposure at one site on the film frame, whether it be from a single exposure or 20 exposures. But on digital, you have separate complete exposures with a 256-value tonal scale, but since an analog:digital conversion has occurred and linearized the exposure data, the program doesn't really know how bright something was in real life (in Ev, or Cd/m^2 as light meters read).

Case in point: this first shot I've linked was made using my DSLR and combining 7 separate exposures in PS. It probably took me 6 hours in PS to make this image (and I'm extremely proficient at PS).

http://www.pbase.com/drpablo74/image/60886247

This second shot was made using a single sheet of slide film in my 4x5 camera. I opened up the shutter once, then covered the lens briefly between desired exposures, and did it about 10 times over the course of a half hour. That's it. It was done.

http://www.pbase.com/drpablo74/image/71415447

That said, there are a couple ways of doing it in PS. One strategy for two images is to use the screen blending mode in PS. That requires underexposing both images by one stop, then blending them with screen, or you could properly expose them and drop the exposure values using RAW.

You could also do more or less what I've done for the first example I linked. That is, take the pictures normally, paste them as layers, and then use the lighten blending mode. This will allow the lighter feature to always show through (and how I got the light trails to show through from layer to layer). This might work to get a wedding dress to show up, but it won't work for a black tux. So you might need to use the church as your background layer, then paste the picture of the couple on top of it twice -- once as a "lighten" layer and once as a "darken" layer. Then use masking to keep whatever you want showing through. You can then vary the opacity of the layers to make it look more like a double exposure (i.e. with the couple looking somewhat translucent with the church showing through).

This was sort of a fun experiment of mine with about 7 separate pictures that I combined using mixtures of lighten, darken, layer masks, and the opacity sliders. Where I used darken, the darkest details show up in the picture. where I used lighten, the lightest details showed up in the picture.

http://www.pbase.com/drpablo74/image/61051249.jpg

[KSP1139]

Thank you both for your quick response.