Photography: The Power of Double Exposure

This was actually inspired by a friend of mine over at cameralbs, where he shared one of this photographs.

But right of the bat i noticed two things: that the shots was correctly exposed all over the place, and that the sky wasnt overexposed (something that we often get when shooting overcast conditions). So i asked him what he did, and he told me that he pretty much spot metered of the sky and of the foreground.

So i wanted to try to use this, but in a very different scenario. I love sunsets, and i think a lot of people out there also enjoy the view of a wonderful sunset, the colors the warm feeling etc. Back to the point, to get those beautiful colors of the sky i told you guys a while back to crank down the EV to about -0.7 but in that case you ended up with a silhouette, which can be nice. But i m kind of tired of them!

So what i did is that i set up my camera on my mini tripod, and metered of the foreground (to get the perfect exposure) and then i took the photo, now i metered of the sky and cranked down the EV to about -1 to get nice colors and took the shot.

So now i have two images, one where the foreground is correctly exposed and the background is totally blown or overexposed. And another shot where the foreground is completely black but it has the lovely colors of the sunset.

So i took the photos to photoshop. Added them both into the software, so now i two mini windows inside of photoshop. And then i drag over one image to the other image, doesnt really matter what dirrection you do it because the process will be the same, but inverted if you do it vice versa.

What i did now is that i applied a layer mask to the top layer, the top layer in my case was the one with the very black foreground. I then masked out the bottom of this image so now i have one great image. It can take a very long time to do the masking if you have some very complex objects. I m sorry that i dont have the first to image to show you guys but i do have the final product.

Once your done masking your welcome to either merge the two layers and play around with the photo even more to make those colors pop out! Which was something i did as well as you can see


Thanks for reading and i will try to keep updating as often as i can.