Overlays

Today I was playing with overlays.  They're a fun way to either wreck or enhance your photos, depending on your point of view.  The idea is to take photos of pretty much anything that has colour and texture and combine it with your main photo.

You can use anything you want as an overlay.  In the following shots I've used two lumps of firewood, some papier maché, a lump of marble, and a detail from one of my mother-in-law's paintings.

For the main photos, I took my family and, of course, the back of teddy's head.

This, more or less, is how to do it.

You take your overlay picture and stick it on a separate layer over your subject photo.  As a Gimp user, I use either multiply or overlay mode for the overlay.  If you have too much of a pattern over your subject, use Gaussian blur on the offending part of the overlay.

For example, in each of the following pictures I selected the overlay then put a quick mask over it.  Then I erased the mask over the faces.  I toggled the quick mask to leave a selection.  Next (making sure I was still working on the overlay layer) I feathered the selection and then Gaussian blurred it.

One of the things I like about this technique is the fact that I don't have to be accurate with the masking.  In fact, it pays not to be too accurate because it helps tie the image together.

You can add as many overlays as you feel like.  They all add to the texture.

You can also be a lot more subtle with overlays than I have been in the following examples.

Go on, try it.  You know you want to.