No, This Is Not A Projected Slide

If you’re following this blog for a while, you know that I am a little bit obsessed with using slide projectors while shooting. (either for background or for lighting the model). I’ve am starting to try this technique out myself, though there is still much to refine.

I saw this image on reddit and was sure that it is a projected slide, but photographer Stephen Davies from Swansea, UK shared a tutorial that shows it was done in Photoshop. I was surprised at how easy it was.

Here is the tutorial Stephen sent me (and there is a similar yet NSFW version here). You would need a black and white portrait and a black and white landscape image (or any other image you want to peek from behind the model

Step 1 – Open your background image

Step 2 – Overlay your B&W Portrait on your background image

Step 3 – Set your Layer Blend mode to lighten

Step 4 – So it now looks like this. now manually tweak the image to your liking.

Step 5 – And then crop & Flatten. Voila.