I don’t have Photoshop, so when it comes to making fancy edits of my photographs, well, I’m stuck. All I have is good old (and free) Picasa. Recently, I’ve become obsessed with looking at clever double exposures, I love how they can be beautiful, ghostly images. I really wanted to create some of my own and the other day I discovered you can create a multiple exposed image in Picasa, so I thought I’d share with you how to do it, as there don’t seem to be any good tutorials out there (that I could find anyway!).
The image above was created by layering two photographs (a silhouette of my little girl and an image of light through trees) over one another. Heres how you do it in Picasa:
1. First select your base image. You need to select one that has high contrast – so lots of heavy dark and light – like a silhouette. Now up the contrast so that this is even more so (pull the highlights & shadows bar up to the right).
2. Now select another image to go over the top of this. Sunsets, flowers or something with not a lot of detail or contrast works well here.
3. With your first image open in Picasa:
- click “create“.
- click “Picture collage“. The image will come up on a blank canvas.
- select “multiple exposures” from the drop down box.
4. To add the second image:
- click on the “Clips” tab
- select “get more” and then find the image(s) you want to layer on top from picasa’s library.
- click over the image, and then go back to the “collage” tab.
- drag the image you want on top of the base picture and it will create a double layered image.
5. To save the image click “create Collage” or to undo…. well, I haven’t quite worked this out yet. But you can click “reset” to start again (anyone?!).
Here are a couple more of the ones I created:
Hope that was useful and not too much of a boring technical post!
Tia x
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