A client came to me last month wanting a poster for their band. The vibe they were after: moody, cinematic, “like a face dissolving into a forest.” I knew exactly what they meant. I also knew my last attempt at a double exposure looked less like art and more like I’d sneezed on the layer panel. So I went back to basics and watched this Kelvin Designs tutorial on double exposure in Photoshop, and honestly, it tightened up my whole approach.

If you’ve ever wanted to merge a portrait and a landscape into something that looks intentional rather than accidental, this is the technique to learn. It’s not complicated, but it has a specific sequence that matters. Skip a step or do it out of order and the blend falls apart.

Why the Subject Cutout Makes or Breaks Everything

The whole effect hinges on isolating your portrait subject cleanly before you do anything else. In the tutorial, Kelvin uses the Quick Selection tool to make an initial selection of the subject, then refines it using Select and Mask. That refinement step is the one most people skip when they’re impatient, myself included.

Inside Select and Mask, the key move is using the Refine Edge Brush around hair and soft edges. You’re not trying to get a perfect hard mask. You’re telling Photoshop to be smart about the transitional pixels at the subject’s edges. Output that to a Layer Mask and you’ve got a clean cutout that will hold up when the landscape layer starts blending into it.

One setting worth noting: Kelvin keeps the Feather value low, around 1-2 pixels. Enough to soften the edge slightly, not so much that the subject starts looking like a watercolor painting.

Setting Up the Layers So the Blend Actually Works

Once the portrait is masked and sitting on its own layer, the landscape photo goes above it. Here’s where the blend mode does the heavy lifting. Kelvin sets the landscape layer to Screen mode. Screen drops out the dark values and lets the lighter parts of the landscape show through, which means the sky and bright foliage merge into the subject while the shadows in the portrait stay relatively intact.

The layer order matters here. Portrait on the bottom, landscape on top set to Screen. If you flip that, you get a muddy mess instead of a clean merge.

After that, the landscape layer gets clipped to the portrait using a Clipping Mask (Alt+Click between the layers, or Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+G). This confines the landscape to the silhouette of the portrait, so the effect stays inside the figure rather than bleeding everywhere. That one shortcut is doing a lot of work in this workflow and if you’re not already using it constantly, add it to your rotation immediately.

Dialing In the Tone with Adjustment Layers

Raw blends almost always need tone correction after the fact. The tutorial uses a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer clipped to the landscape to desaturate it slightly, pulling it toward a more unified palette with the portrait beneath. The landscape keeps some color, but it’s muted enough that the two images read as one thing rather than two separate photos stapled together.

There’s also a Levels adjustment to push the highlights in the landscape up, which strengthens the Screen blend and makes the merge feel more luminous. Kelvin keeps the black point anchored so shadows don’t blow out, but nudges the midtone slider left to brighten the overall feel.

These aren’t dramatic adjustments. We’re talking subtle pushes. The goal is coherence, not transformation.

Where I’d Push This Further (or Dial It Back)

Here’s where I’d diverge from the tutorial depending on the project. Screen mode is great when your landscape has a lot of bright, high-contrast areas like open sky or lit foliage. But if your landscape is dark and moody, Screen can wash out the portrait completely and you lose the face in the blend.

For darker landscapes, I’d try Lighten mode instead. It’s more conservative than Screen. It compares pixel values and only replaces what’s darker, which gives you more control when you’re working with a nighttime or low-key source image. For that band poster I mentioned, the forest reference photos my client sent were heavily shadowed, and Lighten mode preserved the portrait structure far better than Screen did.

The other thing I always add that isn’t in this tutorial: a solid color layer at the bottom set to a desaturated tone, usually a warm grey or a cool off-white. It gives the composite a consistent base and prevents whatever’s sitting behind the layers from affecting the blend in unexpected ways. Especially useful if you’re exporting for print.

The Part That Carries the Whole Effect

If there’s one thing to take away from Kelvin’s approach, it’s this: the mask quality at the start determines everything downstream. A sloppy cutout will fight you through every adjustment layer, every blend mode tweak, every export. Spend the extra two minutes in Select and Mask and you’ll save yourself twenty minutes of patching later.

Watch the full tutorial from Kelvin Designs for the visual walkthrough. Seeing exactly where his cursor goes during the masking step is worth more than any written description of it.