Double-exposure photos can be super interesting and beautiful when composed well. This is challenging. Look at my photos, you'll note they aren't super interesting because the subjects were not super interesting to start with (limited time thanks to my twins!).
The easiest place to start with double-exposure photos is black and white because we do not have to concern ourselves with the complexities of color when forming our image.
To start, how do we convert a photo to black and white? As a photographer, I typically avoid filters, but with cell phone photography, this is the quickest and easiest way to edit your photo and create a black-and-white image. Full disclosure - I have an Android Phone (Pixel 7a) and have no idea what options are available on an iPhone for editing. The options should be similar. When I open a photo and click "edit", I have various editing options. The first place I start is "Crop".
Cropping is such a basic step, but an important one. It's hard to generate a properly composed photo when shooting especially if pressed for time. The cropping tool will allow you to create a good composition after the fact. I always crop to the original aspect ratio (on my phone, that's 4:3), but there should be a menu that provides you with various options (such as Free, Square, 5:4, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9). These are ratios. So, if you wanted to print the final image, you would want to get a print that is equivalent to these ratios. If your image is cropped to 3:2, this would be appropriate for a 6x4 or any multiples of that (9x6, 12x8, etc), and same for the other ratios. If ordering prints, you can always adjust the size, but be mindful of your cropping because you may cut off part of your image that you want to keep if your original crop is too close.
The crop option also allows us to rotate an image 90 degrees, 180 degrees, or 270 degrees. If you took a photo and noticed it's not quite straight, but close, you can turn it slightly using the degree tool. I do this a lot at the beach (the horizon should be parallel to the bottom of the photo) or with any photos containing straight lines. A third option adjusts perspective. This option will distort your photo - picture pushing the top of your image back and the bottom of your image forward, or vice versa. You can also do the same thing horizontally. I rarely use this.
If there are distractors in your image, you may have the magic eraser option under "Tools". This, though not perfect, works well enough to remove small things that you may not want in your image.
After cropping, if I intend to transform it into a black-and-white image, I will utilize the filter option in my photo editing screen. Usually, no photo is perfect after adding a filter to it but eliminating color gives us a better shot at finding a good filter. My phone provides four black-and-white filters (Onyx, Eiffel, Vogue, and Vista). For these images, I used the Vogue option because I liked the look of it the best.
Once I'm happy with the two images I wish to combine, I make sure to save them. I always save it as a copy so I still have my original image if I wish to do something different with it later.
From here, to create the double exposure, I move to Snapseed. You cannot do this with the editing software that comes on your phone (at least for Android - let me know if iPhone has an option!). When you open Snapseed, you click on the plus sign to open a photo. Find the first photo that you wish to use for your double exposure. Once loaded, click on "Tools" at the bottom and select the "Double Exposure" option. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see the option to add a photo. Click on that and select your second photo. When you do this, the app will combine the two photos making them more translucent than they originally were. From here, you can play with which photo has a stronger presence (is darker) by clicking on the raindrop at the bottom of the screen and using the slider to adjust how you wish. There is also an option that looks like some arranged cards. This option is similar to the idea of a filter. You can click on these to see if you like the look of any of them. When you are satisfied with your image, you click the check mark. Click on the export option and save a copy of your photo. Look for an update to this blog soon containing a screen recording of me creating my images.
Congrats, you created your first double exposure!
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