How to overlay color and black&white macro images for improved detail

Blogged by Simon on July 04, 2010 9:46pm | Last updated by Simon on July 04, 2010 11:38pm |

After getting feedback from Jason on the bubble coral photo overlay a while back, I decided to write up a small step by step tutorial on how to achieve this effect. It’s not an overly complicated process, but can be very effective. Note the bubble coral was shot with the 105mm lens, and these modifications work best for super macro, but anything with enough visible surface structure should work. The steps described in here assume you use Apple’s Aperture with the Silver Efex Pro plugin and Photoshop, but could easily be achieved using only Photoshop with similar results.

Original Version

bubble coralTo the left you can see the original color image. It is slightly overexposed and the fine surface structure of the coral is visible, albeit too bright.

Unfortunately, when taking the photo I used manual flash under water with a subject distance of less than 30cm and cranked it up too much, resulting in flat light and an overexposed image.

The colors look washed out, and even level adjustments will only get us as far, because most pixels are in a narrow range in the highlights. A good way to bring out these highlights is enhancing local contrast as we see in the next step.

Step 1: Create A Black&White Version

Bubble Coral Black&White VersionThe first step towards our overlay composition will be to create a black&white version of our shot which will later serve as the background.

I am using the SilverEfex Pro plugin for Aperture to achieve this, but you could do it in Photoshop with similar results.

SilverEfex Pro has several color filters available for the conversion, which increase the dynamic range of the filter color, i.e. if your shot has a particular tone, use the corresponding filter for the conversion to achieve better shadows and highlights – here I’m using the yellow filter and set the ’structure’ parameter in Silver Efex Pro to +50%. Structure is important, it separates black and white in the fine details and enhances the local contrast between tones.

Once the black&white version has been created, I return to Aperture and level adjust it once again for pure black and white. Make sure you have auto-versioning turned on so the plugin doesn’t overwrite your original version of the photo.

Step 2: Overlay In Photoshop

Bubble Coral Final VersionThe second and final step is merging these two versions into one photo using Photoshop. You can simply select both versions in Aperture, right-click them, and select “edit with Adobe Photoshop”. If you haven’t configured Aperture to work with Photoshop yet, choose Photoshop as the external photo editor under Preferences/Export.

Once opened in Photoshop, let’s start with the black&white version. Add a layer to this image, selecting “Layers/New Layer”. Then, open the color version, perform a “select all”, “copy”, and “paste” into the newly created layer on top of the black and white image.

Now click onto this layer to select it in the layers palette, then right click for blending options and choose blending style overlay and opacity 50%, or vary the opacity to your liking. That’s it, you have just completed the final step and your resulting image should look like the one to the left.

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