How to Create Watercolor Multiple Exposure Effect in Photoshop
Adding watercolors to an original image or work of art is always a great way to bring life to a static or colorless image. When using Adobe Photoshop, such a process is easier than you can image. Through the short video tutorial below you will learn how to use the watercolor multiple exposure effect within Photoshop.
Watercolor Girl – Multiple Exposure Effect | Photoshop Tutorial
In this quick tutorial I’ll show you how to create this watercolor portrait effect. In Photoshop we start off with three elements. Sunsplash watercolor paint a portrait of a girl in a grungy looking canvas texture. First we copy the image of the go onto our clipboard then we select the watercolor layer and click the new mosque button to view this empty mask. We hold down the Allt or auction key and then click the mask box then we paste all girl into the mask by going to Edit Paste Special paste in place by pasting. This way we ensure the girl is placed in the exact same position as when we copied. You notice that she is been saturated. Photoshop does that automatically because masks are always a greyscale image. Now we want to add a bit more contrast to our mass. We do this by going to image adjustments curves. Then we move the left slider into the middle and the right slider is just to the right of it. The exact settings here will depend on your image. We are looking for a lot of contrast but it’s also important to leave a small amount of gray between blacks and whites to soften the transition. Otherwise we’d end up with an ugly pixellated effects. We finish up by inverting the mask by going to image adjustments Inv. then we hold down the old or Option key again and click the watercolor layer box to stop viewing our mask. As you can see we’ve already created a fairly cool effects here.
I’d like to improve the composition though to do this we click the paperclip between a layer box and mask box. As you can see it disappears. This means that we can now move our image layer independently of its mask so we can change the position and orientation of a watercolor image to create an even nicer composition. There are still a few things missing though. We’ve lost a lot of detail from her face and arms. It would be nice if we could leave a faint hint of the original image in these areas. To do this we liked our girl and saturated by going to image adjustments. D saturate. Then we set the blending mode to multiply and we don’t want it showing everywhere though. So we hold down the old Option key and click the new mosque button to create an inverted mask. Then we paint it back in by applying a white soft brush with a medium flow setting onto our mask. It’s important to limit how much we reveal here. We only paint in details we think are absolutely necessary because ultimately we want the viewers to seek out all that missing detail in the watercolors. Finally we are going to add some texture to the canvas itself. We enable the grungy canvas layer and then change the blending mode to multiply. Then we finish up by lowering the capacity to about 15 percent. I’m really happy with this now. We’ve created a really complex looking effect in just a few minutes and we can use this effect with all kinds of different image combinations. That’s it for this tutorial. If you enjoyed it please subscribe and hit the like button in RC.
Special thanks to Graphics Geeks for the video tutorial and walk through.
