Create Double Exposures with a Phone and Snapseed App

hey guys and welcome to a Rahul Nimble photography Blog and today we're going to be learning at doing double exposures we're just using your mobile phone so stay tuned we've got a lot to get through

CHNAGE BACKGROUDS

so one of the first things you're going to need is your mobile phone and the app called snap sees help up balloons shipping below where you can download it you also go need either a tripod or your friend to help you out on this and some way of a shutter release so you can actually activate the camera without touching it as well so by the earphone jack as I mentioned in my previous video or you can use your voice or you have an app on here that when I say cheese every time it takes a photo and that seems to work pretty well for me it's less hassle with cabling things there and you also going to need and very importantly is a white background so I've actually got my cream background here I know it looks white but that's just due to the light setup that I've actually got yeah stay tuned and let's get to it

Effects

hi there guys and welcome to another Rahul photography video and today we're going to be looking at how to do a very simple effect that is known as double exposure a double exposure photography it's quite a tricky one to do on a PC so I'm going to be showing you how to do it very easily on a phone and just using one app okay so as you can see I've taken a photo here it's just me against a very light wall using a light white or cream background room works really well the lighter the better and I've stuck two lights in just to illuminate certain parts of the image but I'm going to essentially be taking that background out and making it as white as possible like it was shot in the studio so we're just going to share that with the app Snapseed I'll pop in the link in the description below of where you can download it it's available for iOS and Android if you haven't heard about it now you need to check it out this app is amazing

so once you've actually got the photo in here I shot it in rule because my phone has got raw capability

you can shoot just basic camera is still work with JPEG it probably won't come out as great just because the quality is a bit lower but it will still give the overall effect if you follow these tips so once you've loaded the photo in you need to make sure that you take out the color and you need to get rid of any dark patches in the photo that are not your subject so as you can see I'm dressed in black and that's exactly what I wanted to do with this image was that I be in full black so you can see all the outlines but the lights and the shadows around me I want gone so let's get to it right I'm going to go into the saturation I'm going to take that down and I'm going to bump up the exposure just a little bit not too much and I want to increase the contrast and as you can see it's starting to look kind of like studio but we getting there and I'm going to turn up the structure on there because I want the turns the gray tones as you can see on my arm and my face the different variations of gray to white and black working quite well to give that HDR effect as you get with other photos but it's like an HDR

black-and-white which I find is really appealing in terms of what we're trying to do today so after you've done that move on to the next thing so you go hit that tick at the bottom and then you go to go to edit and you're going to look for details so there is a button at the top here in the Tools menu called details so tap on that and this should give you an option to change between structure and sharpening so structure basically will give you a bit of overall effect around everything and sharpening will sort of just bump up the

things like the beard that you can see there and some of the details that sort of get missed in these kind of

photographs so once I'm happy with sharpening I'm going to next crop the image so we need to get rid of those lights so if you tap on the little pin there it should come up with menu again now just under tune image there's a crop tool so tap on crop tool and that will take you into either the free style crop or you can actually pick one of the crops depending on the image firm scenes as I've got those lights I'm going to do my own freehand crop so you can actually adjust and I just want a bit of headroom in there so it gives my photo space but it's also not crowding you know you don't cut off your head and you don't want less height on it you want an even sort of background as well so once you've done that crop the photo and you can actually rotate to adjust the settings on there so you can it will automatically rotate it to align it to the straight straight line in the image but sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't

today it seems to be doing exactly what I wanted to do which is very strange and yeah once you've got the image the final thing you're going to do now is we need to get rid of those shadows behind my face and in the corner so I'm going to tap on a tool go back so go into the tool settings and there is an option for brush and tap on brush and you might have seen my previous videos I've used the brush tool so many times for this specific effect so you want to go to its as exposure and tap on the exposure tool and up the exposure it's already at the highest because I used it previously so it's 1.0 it usually saves your settings which is really brilliantly don't have to keep tapping up and down and I'm going to switch on the eye because I want to see where I'm actually making this effect on the picture

let's start here and don't worry about it hitting the outline of you you can always go back and edit edited output arrays where you've actually put in this effect I'm just doing it very quickly to show you how it actually works and there we go

so now in some cases because in this particular image I had made the mistake of having this very dark shadow in front of me it'd probably take me a couple of gos of saving and going back in and adding more exposure to that area and the right and the left hand quarter site where I had a bit of a duck patch so you can go over that as many times as you need so I'll clean you example so I'm quite happy with how it's turning out I hit the tick there and it edits there for me and I can go back in with the brush again and this will give me a bit more exposure as you can see that's all disappearing so it's not a big problem but just bear in mind when you're taking the photo to make sure that you're getting rid of things like highlights and it just saves a bit of time as well as it's you know you're not wasting time trying to figure out how to fix that and change that and sort them okay so once you're happy with how it looks in terms of the oval getting rid of any shadows and getting rid of any lines or objects that are not meant to be there in the photo hit that tick and now we're going to get to the magic so once you've done that hit the tick again and scroll down to the bottom and you will see a tool in the filter section called double

exposure so what you want to do is tap on there and this will bring up the double exposure menu and at the bottom of the screen there's a little plus sign above picture

and you need to tap on that and you need to add a picture from your gallery that you think will work quite well and the lovely thing is even if it doesn't work you can try another photo and you can try another photo another photo so I'm going to go into my downloads and I'm going to tap on one of the pictures so here I have a very detailed picture of New York also I'm going to add that in there and as you can see it sort of added that exposure in and you can see me and you can see the skyline of New York but I want that Empire State Building to be sort of in the center of me there and you can just pinch zoom it come out you can twist it you can do all sorts of things to you know make it work for you so in this situation I prefer the Empire State Building

just sitting above my ear there

I kind of like the straight straight okay so once you've got it centered where you want it once you've got it Center where you want to hit that tick button now there are a few options before you hit that tick button and if you tap a little thing that looks like a tiny old book and it'll give you options but like pre options before you even go back out to do this kind of effect so you get like lightin which is pretty cool this effect basically lightens up the areas as you can tell all the dark areas and sort of makes them a very like prey but it retains more of the image and you lose more of your bad detail which is really really cool if you're going to be using if you've got very bright images and then you've got this other option which I personally don't like because I don't feel this is my style of things but the darken can work for some people if you can make it work let me know in the comments below and you can also add there's an ADD thing and I'm not sure what this is meant to do and then you've also got subtract so that sort of takes away some of the light on you and then you've also got overlay but I'm going to stick to default because I want to retain that color and the image quality of that shot of New York through me so once you've done that and don't panic because this is where the trick comes in and this is why I love this app so much all right so at the top of the screen you'll see a little arrow that's curved above what looks like two pieces of paper that xse just layers the top on there and I'll bring up this menu and you want to go to view edit and once you view the edits you want to go to it's a double exposure so this brings up all the edits you've made to the photograph so far and you want to tap on this double exposure one and I'll bring up a new menu and just before the dust and there's a little paintbrush in a box you want to set that and suddenly that's all gone your effect is gone the reason being is now you be you have the power to paint that effect onto your image so I'm just going to tap the eye and I'm going to just paint on to me the image and I don't know if you can see it faintly through the red there it's coming through on that side and don't worry about the edges I'm going to clear those up in a minute

I'm just showing you basically what it does so once you're happy with getting all the dark areas and image done what you want to do is hit that eye again and you want to go back into the image and tap down on that arrow to remove the exposure so it's kind of like a racing where you've gone before and you can just do that with the paintbrush with your finger just on the screen so you don't need to be well-versed in

Photoshop to do this you don't need you know hours of cutting and masking and so on that you do use when you do this in Photoshop

it just works very simply and the effect can be simple and low-cost so you can play around with this I like the effect that it's giving me in terms of playing around with double exposure um I've been really excited to do this for quite awhile and the pain of sitting through Photoshop to do it just puts me off a little bit sometimes so I kind of like just doing this in Snapseed so it works really well I've done another photo like this do check my Instagram account there's a picture of a good friend of mine Daniel Jenkins a musician and I did one with still in my house against the same cream wall and it seemed to work out pretty well but do you check it out and once you're happy with the Edit obviously you can go back

and change certain things I want that the darkness in that image and I want a bit more color and I've learned a bit more contrast because I don't feel like it so much there so I'm going to up that contrast as you can see and a bit of saturation we get that lovely so or in the sky that you get photo there you can bump up the highlights and I'm going to go back into details I'm going to add a bit more structure and put more of the sharpen images to give my eye in there and everything so this is basically a quick tutorial on how to do double exposures with just your phone and this app this amazing app so yep do check it out


soundcloud and yeah look forward to next one and keep shooting