Mike DelGaudio

Picasa has an underused feature in it that allows you to simulate a multiple exposure. We’ve covered how to do it before in this post.
In order to complete this tutorial you’ll need Picasa the photo editing and management software from Google.

The typical multi-exposure effect in Picasa simply overlays two (or more ) selected pictures together. However, I find that the resulting image is often a little too busy, unless you take some additional steps.

Lets use an example. I recently went to New Orleans and took some pictures of St Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. I wanted to illustrate the beauty of the church, both inside and out. I thought a multi-exposure would be perfect here.

Here is the outside shot I wanted to use:

And this is the inside shot I wanted:

If I just mix the two together using Multi-Exposure (for how to do this read my tutorial)

I get a result that is a little busy and not really what I want. Like this:

We can do better.

Here is what I wanted to fix:

- chandelier, lettering and stained glass kind of obscure the façade of the church – one of the things I’m trying to highlight.
- the clouds in the sky in the background on the left cut into the lettering I do want to show.

We can fix this using Soft Focus and Focal Black and White as follows:

On the inside image of the statue, first I applied strong soft focus to the parts of the image I want to de-emphasize:

Then, I added Focal B&W to the same area so the yellow cast on the walls don’t affect the color of the façade.

Next, I went to the outside image and also applied soft focus:

Now I have two images that each have areas de-emphasized where the subject of the other image will appear.
So, NOW we can do the multi-exposure. Which gives us this:

Close, but the combination of the images causes the whole thing to be a bit dim for me. Lets see what Picasa can do. I click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” effect, which corrects the exposure histogram and gives us our final image:

You can also see the high resolution version.

You can see all the images in higher resolution by visiting my Picasa Web Album:

Improving Multi Exposures

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, Photo Editing, Technique, Multi-Exposures[/tags]