How to Use Overlays in Photoshop – Easily Apply Creative Overlays

Add depth to a photo by adding textures and overlays in Photoshop. We are going to use a combination of tools to help our overlay blend with our image. Easily Apply Creative Overlays in Photoshop.

How to Use Overlays in Photoshop

Here’s the image we’re going to start off with. I’m going to duplicate the background layer with CMD+J. You want to call it subject, and I already have my image in another tab that we’re going to use as the overlay. With my move tool and holding down the shift key.

I’m going to drag it up to the tab where my subject is then let go . The first thing I’m going to do is create a smart object out of this layer I’ll call it overlay. Create a smart object, right-click say Convert to smart object.

And I want to size it and position it. I used the free transform command T and at the top, as long as I had this chain up here selected, it’s going to maintain the aspect ratio and I’m going to grab any of these handles here and just kind of make it at least as big.

I’m going to come up here to the top and click this checkmark to commit my transform. So since the background is dark, I’m going to change the blend mode and come down here in the lighten section here, says lighten and Screen, color dodge, linear dodge, and lighter color.

So I think Screen works pretty well for right now, so I’m going to select screen. So now looking at this, it’s a good time to position your overlay. So my goal here is to have this look like you’re actually looking through a pane of glass to somebody on the other side.

And so there may be some of these drops that may land upon her face. Not too many. So what I’m trying to do now is either move or transform this again if I am on my overlay and I just use my move tool.

You can see that I’m moving my overlay up here a little bit. I think I want to hit command +T, because I’m going to stretch this some more, give myself a little bit more room and move this to a point where later on,

I don’t want to have to remove too much of this from her face. Some can be there, so I’m going to try and position it somewhere here where it is not going to have too much in the way of objects I need to remove.

Then you can use your transform and move this around to your liking. Now I’m going to commit the transform at the top. And now what I want to do is I want to blur a little bit of the overlay.

I want to come up here to filter blur Gaussian blur. You can use any other blur tool that you want box blur, for instance, is a good one. I’m going to use Gaussian and blur. And if I take this all the way down and then bring it up a little bit.

I think and bring it up to about five and just a little blur. I click on the preview. There’s two before and there’s after. So a little bit of blur and say, OK. And because this is a smart object, if you come over here to the far right of the Layers panel and you see these circles right

here, if you click on that and you come over here to see that the smart filter has been added for Gaussian Blur, and this is because we made the overlay layer a smart object. And now with this overlay, I want to kind of darken it a little bit in certain areas.

So I’m going to add an adjustment from up here. Image adjustments, levels. And notice I did not make a levels adjustment layer. I added it from the menu at the top. And what you also see is over here and smart filters levels have been added.

So it’s part of these smart filters. That means we can come back into levels and change it anytime we want to. And it’s all going to be attached to the overlay layer. So I just see what I’m like in here trying to see what’s going to fit any of these adjustments here.

And by adjusting these levels, whether it’s the mid-tones, highlights, or shadows, you can see how it’s affecting your overlay. Right now, I’ll say, OK, I could still move my overlay. I can transform it if I’m on my move tool and on the overlay.

I can move around like this and move that slightly. Do me a favor. Hit that like button. It really helps the channel. I Appreciate it. And now I’d like the overlay to kind of take on some of the colors of the background image or the subject image.

So we’re going to kind of color match here so we can use one of the new features in Photoshop, one of the new neural filters. So if we come up here to filter neural filters and there’s something right here called harmonization.

So if I click on this and then I come up here, it says reference image. So we have to select a layer. And so the layer that we’re selecting is the layer that we’re getting the color from. We’re going to have some of that color come from the subject layer onto our overlay. I’m going to select the subject and

it says processing on device and right here we click on this. This is like a before and after you show your original. So I click on that. That’s before, that’s after, and you can adjust the strength and change any of the colors here and the default, the 75.

I take it all the way up to 100 and take it down to 50 and leave it at 70. And I’m not going to change any of the other colors right now. And I have a whole video on just using the harmonization neural filter. I’ll leave a link in the description.

Come down here and choose the output. And the output we’re going to choose a smart filter and we’re going to say, OK on the overlay layer, right below is all the smart filters, neural filters, levels and gaussian blur, and we can double click on any of these and change them.

So at this point, you might want to put a layer mask on the overlay layer and paint away some of the drops from her face. You can do that. You can actually change the opacity of the overlay layer.

You can bring this down. See how that affects things. Something like that. That’s 80. They bring it up to 100. That’s what it looks like. So you have that option as far as a control in your effect. If I put in a layer mask now on the overlay layer.

And if I paint when my brush, B for the brush tool and with my swatch over here on black, so on my brush, I just make sure that my hardness is all the way to zero and make my brush bigger and with my layer mask selected over here and with a low flow, I could just paint in areas

where I want to basically remove some of the effect of the drops on her face. I can brush those away or brush them so that they are a lot less visible, maybe in her hair here. I don’t want these maybe appear at the top of her head.

I don’t want that red shadow, but adding a white mask and when you brush paint with black, you can paint away or reduce some of the effects of the overlay on your subject. And even after you’ve added a layer mask, you can still move your overlay.

You just click on this chain right here and select the overlay thumbnail itself. And with your move to see, you could still move it and then just click right in the area where this chain was to attach it again.

So here is the image before we added our overlay, and here is the image. With the overlay in all of the smart filters added.

Read the previous blog article here ➡️ Change Object Color in Photoshop – Turn White into Any Color

See my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com