A Portrait Made of Forest and Sky
Picture a face built out of trees, a shoulder dissolving into fog over distant mountains, or a head full of birds where hair should be. This “double exposure” portrait style shows up constantly on Instagram and movie posters, and it looks like something only a film photographer with a darkroom and years of patience could manage, running two rolls through one camera and trusting the chemistry to line up.
Photographer Ted Chin, known on Instagram as @eye.c, showed otherwise. In a tutorial posted to the Adobe Photoshop Instagram account on March 31, 2017, and later summarized by PetaPixel and Neatorama, Chin demonstrated that the whole effect can be built in Photoshop with nothing more exotic than a magic wand tool, a mask, and one blend mode. No film, no darkroom, no decade of practice, just a specific sequence of decisions about which pixels get to show and which don’t.
The Real Puzzle: Why Doesn’t It Turn to Mud?
If you simply drop a landscape photo on top of a portrait and lower the opacity, you don’t get a crisp silhouette full of trees, you get a blurry, double-ghosted mess where both images fight for the same space. What stops the landscape from smearing across the whole frame instead of sitting neatly inside the shape of a person?
It isn’t artistic talent or a steady hand. It’s a technical decision, made early, that quietly controls the entire outcome.
Step One: Cutting the Person Out of the Frame
The trick starts with isolating the subject. Chin’s method uses the Magic Wand Tool (shortcut “W”) to select the background behind the portrait, then refines that selection with Select and Mask, which smooths rough spots so hair and edges don’t look jagged or pasted on.
A flat, simple background, the kind these portraits are usually shot against, makes the Magic Wand’s job dramatically easier. The payoff of this step isn’t a finished photo at all; it’s a mask, a precise record of exactly where the person sits in the frame, down to the edge of every strand of hair.
Step Two: Handing That Shape to a Different Photo
That mask doesn’t get discarded once the portrait is cut out. Chin’s method loads the exact same selection by Ctrl-clicking the mask, then applies it to a second, entirely unrelated image: a landscape.
Before that happens, the landscape gets its own prep work. Its levels are adjusted (Ctrl+L) so the brightness is predictable, especially in the sky, which keeps the later selection and blending behaving cleanly. The landscape’s mask is then unlinked so it can be repositioned independently of the portrait. Rather than being placed loosely over the person, the landscape is clipped into the identical silhouette carved out in step one.
The One Switch That Does All the Work
A duplicate of the original portrait layer is placed above the landscape layer, and its blend mode gets switched to “Lighten.”
Lighten mode does something simple: for every pixel, Photoshop compares the two layers stacked at that point and keeps whichever one is brighter, discarding the darker one. A portrait’s shadows, the dark side of a cheek, dark strands of hair, are usually darker than a bright sky or sunlit tree line, so the landscape wins there and shows through. Meanwhile, the portrait’s own highlights, like bright skin or light hair, are often brighter than the landscape underneath, so those survive too. One toggle, instead of hours of manual painting, is what makes the two images read as a single, seamless exposure rather than a sloppy overlay.
A Technique Built to Keep Growing
Once this mechanism exists, it isn’t locked to a single landscape. Chin’s tutorial adds extra elements, flowers specifically, using the same Lighten blend mode stacked on top, building the final image layer by layer rather than in one sweeping edit.
Even the flat white background left over from the masking step doesn’t go to waste. Because the subject was already cleanly isolated, that white fill can later be swapped for black, a gradient, or an entirely new photo, with no re-masking needed.
What This Isn’t
None of this recreates what film photographers actually did. A genuine double exposure happens optically: light strikes the same frame of film twice, in-camera, mixing on the physical emulsion before any image is developed, no masks, no blend modes, no software decisions involved.
What Chin built mimics the visual result of that process without a film camera, a second exposure, or a darkroom in sight. It’s a different process arriving at a similar-looking destination, a distinction most people scrolling past one of these portraits would never stop to ask about.