How to Use Overlays in Photoshop

by Kelvin Pimont from Kelvin Designs

In this Photoshop tutorial, I will teach you how to use overlays in Photoshop. We're going to build 4 Photoshop projects, starting with a very simple and easy composite using just one overlay and building toward more and more stunning effects with each subsequent project.

You can get these free Photoshop overlays to follow along with this tutorial here:

Download the Source Files for this episode:

This post has been adapted from the YouTube tutorial found below.

Watch the video above or just follow the steps as outlined below.

In this tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to use overlays in Photoshop, starting with a pretty simple project. 

I've provided six overlays along with several example images that you can download and use to follow along as we go through this tutorial, so be sure to download those. Once you have these files, keep reading for an outline of what we'll be covering here and the kinds of techniques you can expect to be able to apply by the end of the lesson!

The 4 Photoshop Overlay projects you'll learn.

Project 1: Using one overlay

In the first project we'll add some dramatic lighting by adding an overlay.

See before (on the left) and after (on the right) below:

This cool effect is actually very simple to achieve. It just takes a couple of steps and a single blending change and you'll be able to do the same thing.

Project 2: Using multiple overlays

In the second project, we're going to introduce multiple overlays. You can see the before and after here:

Quite spectacular, right? This effect is actually really simple as well, just like the first project. If you've never used overlays before or hardly know any Photoshop, you'll see how easily we can do this, too.

Project 3: Using neural filters and displacement maps

Then we'll take it to the next level by learning some of the new effects we can create using what Photoshop has introduced as neural filters. In this project, we're going to create shadows that follow depth.

You can see the before here:

 and the after here:

You can see how the shadows in the after image skew around objects, such as the stairs and the floor. This effect may look complicated, but it's actually simple and makes a big difference, as I will show you.

4. Advanced Photoshop overlays and special effects

Finally, in the last project we're going to work on adding some special effects. You can see the before (left) and the after (right) here:

To get started, once you have downloaded the source files we will be working with today, you can navigate to the "Download" > "Example Images" folder and open image 1 in Photoshop.

Now we have this image.

If your Photoshop doesn't look the same as the above picture, then first open up the Window menu from the top toolbar and make sure "Application Frame" is enabled; that will hide everything else. (Note: if you are on a Windows machine, you won't have this option.)

The second thing you can do is, in the same Window menu, navigate to Workspace and select Essentials, which should be the default. (see image below)

Finally, if it still doesn't look the same, hit the Reset Essentials button as shown below.

This is what your window should look like now.

The first thing I like to do when working with overlays is put them into my library.

So first we'll drag the Libraries window to the middle so we have some room, and then we'll resize it to make it a little bigger.

I'm currently in my KD overlays collection, and if you've bought my overlays then you know that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of overlays. So, just to keep the free overlays that we are using for this material organized, let's go ahead and create a new group using the folder icon at the bottom of the window. I'll call this group "Free KD overlays," but feel free to name it anything that'll help you keep this content organized.

You will then be prompted to drag and drop the overlays into the group. So I'm going to go ahead and go back to the Finder window and select these overlays.

Then I'll click and drag these overlays back to Photoshop and into the group we've just created.

That will put the overlays into this group and also upload them to the cloud so that I have access to my own library from any Creative Cloud device.

Project 1: Using one overlay

To start off the first project, I'm going to make the picture's window a little bigger using Command-Plus (+), and then I will make the picture itself smaller by holding the Option key and hitting Command-Minus (-). Now we can go ahead and click on the Move tool.

Now drag and drop the "Crystals-116" overlay from the Libraries window to the picture. When I drag and drop from my library, it automatically creates a layer of the overlay. Then, when I hit return, this overlay is converted into a smart object. You should see a little cloud in the corner of the layer's icon, meaning that the object is in your library. Now that we have this overlay over our picture as a smart object, I'm going to switch to the Hard Light blending mode

If you're unfamiliar with blending modes, they are just different ways that layers interact with each other. For example, in the Multiply mode, dark colors darken the underlying image while light colors on the multiply layer are transparent.

Conversely, the Lighten and Screen modes do the opposite; anything that's white is visible, while anything that's black is transparent. We won't cover every blending mode in this tutorial, but we'll be using some of them for our overlays. When I'm trying to colorize an image using an overlay such as in this case, I use the Hard Light blending mode.

We'll then switch to the free transform tool. You can use the keyboard shortcut Command-T to switch to it, or you can access it from the Edit menu as shown here.

Now we can rotate and resize the overlay as we want by clicking and holding one of the corner handles. If we hold the Option key while resizing, it'll resize the selection from the center, which is very useful.

My goal in transforming this layer is to try to outline the woman a little bit using the shapes in the overlay. So I'm going to make the layer quite big and rotate it to highlight some of her features.

My final result is the following. You can see the light follow her jawline and let her lips show through, which I think adds some nice drama and cool lighting effects to the image.

Now we hit return, and it's as easy as that. We just added a single layer, used a single blending mode, did a little transformation, and we're done. Now, you can always do other kinds of manipulations on this, but this is, strictly speaking, how you would add a simple overlay to an image.

Project 2: Using multiple overlays

Well, hopefully you found that a pretty easy project to start off with. In this next project, I'm going to teach you how to use two different overlays in slightly different blending modes, and we're even going to introduce some masks in overlays.

Let's start by opening up the second image.

And once again, I'm going to want to occupy all the space I have available to have a nice workspace. So I'm going to hit Command-Plus (+) a few times until the window occupies the full screen, and then hold the Option key and hit Command-Minus (-) to zoom out on the image.

So the first thing I want to do for this image is drag and drop the "Sparkles-16" overlay from the Libraries window to the picture.

Hit return once again, which will create a smart object from my library. And in this case, I'm going to choose the linear dodge blending mode.

Now select the Free Transform tool again, either by going to the Edit menu and hitting Free Transform or by using the Command-T keyboard shortcut.

Hold down the Shift key and grab the corner handle to rotate the overlay in 15 degree increments.

Then hold the Option key and resize the overlay so that it expands from the center. I'll set the size so that the sparkles sit around her face and frame it.

Above you can see my final result. Now, there is a sparkle over the eye on our right, and while it does look kind of cool, I'll show you how to edit that out.

First hit Return. Then go to the layers menu, make sure the overlay layer is still selected, and click on the Mask button as shown below.

I'll set my brush to a smaller size, around the size shown below. To open this brush menu, just right click on your mouse.

Set the brush opacity to 100%.

Make sure that the foreground color is set to black as shown below.

To do that, you first click on the small black and white squares button above the foreground and background colors. This resets the colors to the default, which is white in the front and black in the back.

Then click the arrows button just above the foreground/background colors. This will reverse the colors so that black is the foreground, which is what we want.

So now we have a black brush. Confirm that you are on the mask, not on the layer, as shown below.

Now we can just go ahead and brush the sparkles we don't want out. Mainly these are the sparkles over the eye on our right, and some of the sparkles on the edges of the image, so that they don't distract us.

That's it for the sparkles. Now I also want to add some refractions from the refractions pack, so I will drag and drop "Refractions-77" into our image.

Hit Return again, and in this case, we'll set the blending mode to soft light.

Once again, we will select the Free Transform tool, and again, we will hold the Option key while resizing the overlay so that it expands from the center.

My goal is to light her face using the refractions in the overlay, so I will move and resize the layer accordingly.

In doing this, I do find that the layer has darkened the dark areas too much. To remedy this, I'm going to go ahead and make another mask here on on this layer.

Now I'll lower my opacity to around 20%.

Now we can make our brush a lot bigger.

The brush size you choose in this step depends on the size of your image. In my case this image is pretty big, around 3700 pixels wide, so I chose the size as shown above to match and hit Return.

Now we can just brush out and mask some of this overlay so that the image is mainly being affected in the center area.

If you want to add some of that darkness back, you can reverse the colors again here so that the foreground color is white, and you can brush it in the same way.

Remember, black Conceals and white reveals; that's the default in Photoshop.

At this point we're done with project 2! Hopefully you found that to be very simple as well and have an idea now of how to use multiple overlays and how to use masks in overlays.

I suggest you play around with some of the blending modes to familiarize yourself. The modes I use the most are Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light in some cases, and Linear Dodge (which is pretty amazing but mostly useful for stronger, smaller lights such as the sparkles in this case).

Project 3: Using neural filters and displacement maps

Project 3 is really special. You can see the before image here, which is a great photo but pretty flat:

 and the after image here, which has a lot of depth added by shadows and lights:

In this project, we'll cover how to achieve this effect using what's called neural filters and displacement maps. It is pretty simple, but you will have to follow along really carefully to not miss anything. If you need to repeat this part a few of times to get the hang of it, feel free to do so.

To start this project off, I'm going to go ahead and open this third image in Photoshop.

We can go ahead and zoom in and then zoom out as always so that we have some room to work.

The first step we'll take for this image is to outline the woman. A neat little trick for outlining is that I often find it easier to outline or select a background as opposed to a subject, which is what I'm going to do in this case.

So let's take the Quick Selection tool here.

Now I'll just select the background here by clicking and dragging over the whole background. If anything that is not the background is selected, you can subtract that area from the selection by holding the Option key and clicking and dragging over it.

If you need to change the brush size or hardness for finer control, then you can hold down the Option key and the Control key. With these buttons held, moving your cursor left to right will change the brush size, and moving it up and down will change the brush hardness. I'll choose a brush that is pretty soft and pretty small.

Holding the spacebar and clicking will also let you move around the window. These are all very useful shortcuts when working in Photoshop.

Now, a quick selection tool can sometimes be very useful, but in some cases the tones are too similar and there isn't enough contrast to get an accurate quick selection, in which case some manual selection may be needed. In this case we shouldn't have to change too much manually.

At this point, using the Quick Selection tool I've gotten a pretty decent selection, but it's not perfect. For one thing, the plant on the right and the furniture on the left aren't selected. To fix this, I'm going to select the Rectangular Marquee tool.

Hold the Shift button and click and drag rectangles around the plant section of the image on the right and the furniture section on the left, being careful to avoid the woman. This should add both of those sections to the selection.

Now we can inverse our selection. You can either select Inverse from the Select menu as shown below, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-I.

Now we really have the subject selected. However, the edges of the selection still aren't perfect. So we're going to go into the Select and Mask menu as shown below to make the selection a little bit better.

If we zoom in on the image now, we can see that the selection edge is decent but a little ragged. Note that I'm not outlining the subject to make a composite. I want to use her selection for some manipulation which we'll get to shortly.

To improve the selection, let's enable the smart radius option. This allows the edge to adjust so that sometimes it's soft and sometimes it's hard rather than being uniform. We can then increase the radius just a little bit as shown below.

Now select the Refine Edge Brush tool. Make sure the size is set so that it covers the selection's edge.

With this tool selected, brush over any areas where the background is showing through the selection, and it should basically automatically detect the edges.

The tool usually does a pretty good job. Sometimes it needs a little bit of manual work, but anywhere I have some semi-transparencies, it has pretty good results. This is a neat feature that didn't exist a few years ago.

Using a smaller brush, we can also use this tool to subtract the background section showing through the crook of the woman's left arm. I previously had not had this selected out, but this tool makes it simpler. I'll probably still have to adjust this selection manually, but the main benefit of using the Refine Edges tool is getting the border around the hair right, because setting the edge around the hair manually is extremely tedious and quite difficult to do. So if I am able to get that part done with the Refine Edges tool, the rest can be tweaked as needed without the tool.

Once you're done with this, hit OK.

Now we have ourselves a selection that needs some work here. So to edit your selection, you can go into the Quick Mask mode, as shown below.

Now everything that's selected is red for me. Yours may be the other way around, as the default is for the masked areas to be red instead. I usually prefer to paint in my selection, so I have the selected areas set to red. To change this setting, you can double-click on the Quick Mask mode button and set it to your preference.

You can also change the color the selection is highlighted with, which can be very useful. In this case, it will be useful to do so because red is close to the woman's skin tone and it'll be hard to differentiate the mask from the subject. So in this case, a green would be a little more useful.

Once your color and settings are selected, hit OK. Now we can zoom in and switch to the brush tool, either by pressing B, which is the keyboard shortcut, or selecting it here.

I'll set the brush size much smaller (around 15 px) for finer control. And when I'm doing hard edges such as in this case, I like using 85% hardness. I find that 100% is just too crisp and doesn't give any softness to work with, whereas 85% is actually really good for selecting subjects.

Hit OK, and set the brush opacity back to 100%.

Now as long as I have the foreground color set to black, whatever I paint becomes selected. So the trick in using Quick Selection tools or masking in the Quick Mask mode is to hold down Shift while clicking along the desired edge. What that does is automatically connect the new point to the previous point you placed and make a line between the two, as shown below.

So I'll use this process of holding Shift and clicking along an edge to select the whole thing precisely. In places where the selection is outside of the boundaries and needs to have an area removed, I can use the keyboard shortcut X to invert my colors so that now I'm painting with white. I can then brush out that part of the selection using the white, and then hit X again to invert the colors back to black.

Again, I'm not actually cutting her out to put her on top of a new background, so some minor errors won't make a dramatic difference, but a good selection now is worth a lot of time saved in the future in compositing.

Another tip is that if you want to see the selection a little bit better, given that it's sometimes hard to see the color, you can go to your channels menu and hide the RGB channel to just see the quick mask as shown here.

This allows me to see that there are some random pixels which do not match the subject, so I will go ahead and clean those up. Once the selection is as good as we can get it, we can leave Quick Mask mode using either the keyboard shortcut Q or this button.

So now we have our selection. I'm not going to use it right this second, so I'll click on the Mask button as shown below.

This saves the selection as what's called an alpha channel. This is the same as going to the Select menu and hitting Save Selection.

Now we can go ahead and deselect the selection, either by going to the Select menu and hitting Deselect or by using the keyboard shortcut Command-D

Now let's talk about depth here, because I'm going to add this shadow to make it look like there's an interesting light and that the subject is in some kind of a church or similar setting. And the way we're going to do that is using what's called a depth map.

First, drag and drop in the "Shadow Overlays Exterior-3" overlay and hit Return. Next, let's change the blending mode to Multiply, which is very common. The effect this provides is already pretty cool and definitely adds character, but there's something wrong here. The shadow is not following the image. The image has depth; the stairs and the subject are both in front of the wall, but the shadow isn't reflecting that. So we're going to add a shadow using actual depth.

To do this, we'll use a new feature in Photoshop called neural filters. Click on the Filter menu and select Neural Filters as shown below.

I will zoom out on the image a bit and then select the Depth Blur neural filter.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, just click on the download button and then it'll be available. Let's turn it on to see what it does; it may take a bit of time to process.

What it does is it tries to simulate depth by sharpening the woman, for example, and blurring the background (such as the stairs) a bit.

You can toggle it on and off to see the difference in sharpness it makes.

Now, we're actually not going to apply this filter, but instead we'll use it for a really cool feature called a depth map. Enable the "Output depth map only" option.

And what the depth map does is tell us what in the image is in front and what is in the back. Anything that's dark, like the woman or the furniture, is in the front, while everything that is white is in the back.

So that's all we're doing with this neural filter is creating a depth map. Hit OK on the filter settings, and we now have our depth map.

Now I want her to be even more forward, especially around her shoes, than is being portrayed, which is why I made that selection earlier. So now we want to load our selection.

You can load your selection a number of ways. The easiest is to hold down the Command key and click on the alpha channel we created earlier.

You can alternatively go to the Select menu and hit Load Selection.

Then change the Channel dropdown to Alpha 1 and hit OK, and this will do the same thing.

Once that's selected, I'm going to darken to the area of my selection. To do that, we can navigate to Image > Adjustments > Levels.

We can then darken the area by moving the adjustment marker to the right, taking care not to go too far.

Now, I don't want my shadows to get overly complex interacting with the plants. There's a lot of detail in those plants, so even though it's kind of cheating, I don't really want my shadows to go forward and backwards around them.

To deal with this, let's first deselect our selection.

We can minimize the detail in the plants a number of ways. One way would be to just fill it with white; however, in this case I'd like to do it in a gradient.

Let's go ahead and grab the Dodge tool.

Let's then set the Range field to Midtones, and set the Exposure to 50%.

Now we can use Option-Control to make a bigger brush and get rid of as much detail as we can, especially in the high-detail leaf and stem areas. I'm dodging the color here so that it doesn't really come into play with with our gradient and with our shadows.

I would also like to dial back the white table in the lower left corner which is currently very far forward. To fix that, I just want to dodge shadows and be more subtle than with the plant. I'll set the Range field to Shadows.

Now I'll set the Exposure to 19%.

Trying to brush out the table, I'm finding that it's difficult to modify that whole section because it's in the corner of the image, and I don't actually like this part of the photo anyway. So another way to deal with this is to use the Lasso tool.

We can then make a selection around the table.

Then we can go to the Edit menu and choose Fill.

Finally, we can set Contents in the Fill menu to "Content-Aware" and hit OK. We should see the table section of the depth map be mostly set back to white.

Then we can deselect our selection. These steps should keep too much attention off of the white table in the foreground.

Now we're going to apply the shadow overlay using the depth map we have created. To do this, we will have to save the depth map image as a psd.

First, while on the depth map layer, select all by either using the Command-A keyboard shortcut or by navigating to Select > All.

Next, copy the selection by either using the Command-C keyboard shortcut or by navigating to Edit > Copy.

Then create a new document (Command-N or File > New).

The size of the new document will be taken from the size of the clipboard. Now paste (Command-V or Edit > Paste).

Now I can go ahead and save this as a psd on my desktop. First save (Command-S or File > Save).

Navigate to the Desktop and save the file as "Depth Map.psd".

That should work great. Now go ahead and deselect the selection again (Command-D or Select > Deselect).

Now here's the cool part. Select the shadow layer we imported earlier so that it's visible, and then switch to the Move tool.

Move the shadow layer so that it covers the full image. Use the Free Transform tool (Command-T or Edit > Free Transform) to resize the shadow overlay and make it bigger if needed to make sure it spans the full image.

I've chosen the following position because I like that the light is on her face while the shadows frame her. Now hit Return.

Now, it's important that the overlay that you're using is the same size as the image of your depth map. Currently, my overlay is actually larger than my image. So to make them the same size, we're going to Select All.

Then go to Layer > New > Layer Via Copy, or use the keyboard shortcut Command-J to do the same.

This created a new layer, and if I switch to the Free Transform tool using the Command-T keyboard shortcut, we can see that the layer is exactly the size of my artboard. You can hit Escape to get out of the Free Transform tool.

Now I'm going to hide the original shadow overlay layer and just leave the newly created one visible, and then I'll create a group.

I'll put the visible shadow overlay image into the group, then right-click the layer and convert it into a smart object.

And now we'll use a displacement filter. To do this, go to Filter > Distort > Displace.

The units for the horizontal and vertical scale settings here are pixels, so we'll set the horizontal scale to -200 pixels and the vertical scale to 200 pixels. This will displace the shadow to the left and down. We can leave the rest of the options as the default and hit OK.

You'll now be prompted to find a depth map file. Go ahead and select the depth map psd we saved on our desktop earlier and hit Open.

The displacement should now be applied. When looking at the shadows overlaid on the woman, you should be able to see it displaced to the left and down relative to the shadows on the back wall. You can see it more easily by hiding the image and leaving just the shadow overlay layer. So it basically displaced the overlay based on the depth map, which is quite fantastic.

Had I exaggerated the depth of the stairs when I was creating the depth map, my shadow would have been displaced even more over the steps. Having control over that effect is why you can draw in the desired depth when you're creating your depth map.

The reason I have this overlay in a group and the reason I have it in a smart layer is because I'd like to be able to edit my overlay, without having to redo the displacement filter every time. So to do that, you can just double-click into the layer here.

We can zoom out a bit and go back to the libraries. Drag and drop in the shadow overlay smart object and hit Return.

I will set the overlay to the Multiply blending mode temporarily so I can more easily make sure I'm putting it in the right spot.

Line the smart object up with the other shadow layer, hit Return, and then either hide or delete the shadow overlay that is not the smart object.

Now we can save the smart object overlay (Command-S or File > Save). Now you should have a window where you can move the shadow overlay and save your change, and the overlay on the image itself will be moved accordingly and the displacement filter automatically updated.

Now, you can't necessarily see what the displace filter would have done over the leaves where we modified the depth map, but trust me, when you have a lot of unwanted detail on an object, it's just not worth keeping. But you should be able to see the perspective created in other places, such as the shadows bending where the floor meets the wall, which is very cool.

We can close the shadow overlay window now.

So that was the more technical, difficult part of adding shadows and using depth maps. Now, I actually don't want to use the Multiply blending mode in this case. Multiply feels a little flat, whereas the Color Burn mode looks a little more natural and dramatic.

If I feel like the shadows are too strong on the subject, I still have my selection of her, so I can take out some of it if I want, but I'm going to leave it as is for now.

I do have a cool little trick that I want to show you that is unrelated to overlays. We're going to go ahead and create a gradient map as shown below.

We can take it out of the group. By default, it's just a black and white gradient. So click on the black and white gradient in the Properties section on the right.

We're going to use this gradient to colorize this image. Let's choose some basic colors, blue and yellow, for the gradient.

Now here's the cool part. Now that I have this gradient map, we can change it to the Overlay blending mode so that it overlays those colors on top.

This change adds some dramatic coloring to the image, which is a neat way to bring everything together.

Taking a look at the image, I feel like there's too much blue and not enough yellow, so to correct this we can go back into the Gradient Editor from the gradient map's Properties. We can change the balance of the colors by moving the point in the middle of the gradient map. My final choice is the following, but you can play with your gradient and set it as you'd like.

I can even lower the opacity a bit to lower the contrast of the colors, but I like the color.

Anyhow, that's how you create a depth map and how you can use one of these shadow overlays.

Like I said, you can always just drop the overlay over the image and put it in the Multiply or Color Burn mode, but creating that depth map to have the actual perspective affect the shadows is a very cool technique, and it's actually quite easy to do in Photoshop.

Project 4: Advanced Photoshop overlays and special effects

Our last project is a little more complex. We're going to mix a bunch of things we've learned and then add some new things. We're going to introduce some camera RAW changes in there, and I'm going to teach you how to use my glow actions if you have them.

Let's start off by opening image 4 in Photoshop.

And once again, zoom in and then zoom out to get my artboard a size that I can easily work with.

Like the last project, the first thing I'd like to do is outline the subject. This may or may not be useful in this project, but it's a good habit when doing compositing to outline your subjects. So I'm going to go to the Quick Selection tool. I will then use Option-Control to make my brush a little bigger. Then, as always, I will select the background of the subject.

I will invert the selection, either using the keyboard Command-Shift-I or by going to Select > Inverse.

Then hit Select and Mask.

Let's go ahead and zoom in using Command-Option-Plus (+) and then switch to the Refine Edge Brush tool. Make sure the brush size is big enough to just cover the edge between the selection and the unselected area, and then go ahead and brush over the areas of the background that are showing through to refine the edges.

Sometimes it may be hard to see if the tool is really having an effect, but it really is. Once I have a decent selection, I'll go ahead and save it by navigating to Select > Save Selection.

We don't have to name the selection; by default it'll be called Alpha 1, and it'll show up in the Channels pane. Now we can zoom back out and deselect our selection (Command-D or Select > Deselect).

The first thing I'm going to do is duplicate our image layer here by either dragging it to the New Layer icon or selecting it and using the keyboard shortcut Command-J. Then I'll right click the duplicate layer to convert it to a smart object.

What I'm trying to do is add a light towards the upper-right-hand corner, as you can see in the before and after, as well as add some smoke in the background. I also want some blue highlights on the woman.

So let's go to Filter > Camera Raw Filter (or keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-A) and do some editing there.

Let's go to the basic settings. I want to cool the image considerably, so we can set the temperature to -30 and then add a little bit of magenta in the tints.

We can also open up the shadows a bit and brighten the image by raising the exposure. Remember, I'm trying to simulate a light here, so these settings are mostly to do that for her shoulders.

These settings are almost too much, but it will make sense in a second when I mask it out. Now we can hit OK with these final settings.

Now I'll create a mask here using the Mask button in the bottom right. This mask is currently transparent, so I'm going to fill it with the foreground color black.

Then I'll take the Brush tool.

Once again, using Option-Control, make the brush much bigger and softer. Remember, size is left to right and hardness is up and down. So we'll make the brush very soft and change the opacity to around 50%.

Since I filled my mask with black, everything is hidden, so make sure you have white set as the foreground color, and then we can go in and brush the blue highlights in over the subject's shoulders.

You may find that the blue lighting is being brushed in over the background as well, which we don't want. To address this, I'll load the selection of the subject we created earlier by going to Select > Load Selection.

Then I'll select the Alpha 1 channel and hit OK.

Then finally we can invert that selection (Select > Inverse or Command-Shift-I), go back to the mask layer, and paint in the background with the foreground color set to black.

That will mask the blue fliter out of the background so that it's really just being applied to her. With that done, we can deselect our selection. Note that if I selected the selection first and brushed it in I wouldn't have had to do that in two steps, which we may come back to later.

Now let's go to our overlays in our Libraries, and we can drag and drop in the "Smoke-Overlays-37" and hit Return.

As you can see, it created a smart object of "Smoke-Overlays-37".

Let's go ahead and make this overlay a little bit bigger. We'll switch to the Free Transform tool using Command-T or Edit > Free Transform and then make the overlay bigger, holding the Option key so it expands from the center.

I'd like to see what I'm doing, so I'm going to put the smoke in the Multiply blending mode so that it's just darkening.

I want the smoke to be in the background and not in front of her, so I'm going to select our selection from earlier by holding Command and clicking the Alpha 1 channel as shown below, and then go back to the Layers pane.

I'm going to inverse my selection (Select > Inverse or Command-Shift-I) and then click the mask button.

That is now masking the smoke overlay so that it is only being applied to the background. I'm going to unlink the overlay and the mask by clicking the chain icon next to the smoke overlay layer. This lets me manipulate the smoke independent from the mask. If they are both linked and I move the smoke, it's going to move the mask as well. Now that I've unlinked them, I can move the smoke behind her.

So far, so good. Let's go ahead and do another free transform and make the overlay bigger so that the boundaries extend past the edges of the artboard.

Now I want to show the smoke a bit better. To do this, we can go to Image > Adjustments > Levels (or Command-L) on the smart object.

Now I'll darken the midtones considerably as shown below.

Since this is a smart object, I can simply double-click on the "Levels" adjustment layer and change it at any time if I need to, which is very convenient. It's currently much too strong, so I'm going to lower the opacity to around 37%.

You can toggle the overlay layer on and off to see a before and after of the changes we've made so far. Remember, the Multiply blending mode means black is opaque and white is transparent, so the white smoke is becoming transparent and revealing the colors that are behind, while the shadow areas of the smoke are darkening the image.

We can go back into the Levels and make it even stronger if we want.

There are also other ways to accentuate the smoke if you want to do so. There's one neat trick when using smoke and mist, which is that to accentuate it you add clarity. To do that, we'll go into Filter > Camera Raw Filter (or press Command-Shift-A).

Here we can add clarity. Clarity is basically contrast in the midtones, so when we turn it up we get more of those wisps.

So that was the adding of the smoke.

The blue light is a little off at this point, but the reason I have it blue is because I want to add the blue light overlay, so let's go ahead and do that. Drag and drop in "Cold-Light-Rays-60" from the overlays library and hit Return.

Change the blending mode to Linear Dodge.

We don't want it to be too strong, so lower the opacity a bit.

Now switch to the Free Transform tool. I want the light to come from the right side, so I'll rotate the image so the light starts in the upper-right-hand corner and points to the lower left. Then I'll make it bigger while holding the Option key so it expands from the center.

I'll zoom out here as well, which I generally like to do to give myself more artboard because because my objects (such as this overlay) often go out of the bounds of my image and become harder to control. So Command-Option-Minus (-) makes the image smaller and your artboard bigger, which can be quite useful.

The light in the corner off of the image is a little too blown out, so I'll position it as shown below so only the soft and bright light is visible.

I'll probably have a hard line where there's an edge of the overlay on the image, so I'll have to fix that. For now, I'll hit Return.

At this point, you may see the hard line where the edge of the overlay is. You may have to zoom in to see it clearly. To deal with that, I'm going to create a mask here, switch to the Brush tool, and make sure the brush is at 100% opacity.

Remember, black conceals, so I'll make sure that the foreground color is set to black and then just brush that edge out. I could have done a gradient or a bigger, softer brush to make it more subtle if I wanted.

I probably want to light up her face a little bit. If you remember the blue light camera raw filter adjustment I did on her earlier, I want to add some more of the light on her. But I already have a mask of where it's showing or not, and I want it to only apply to her. How do I have two masks on a single layer?

So it's a neat little trick: you create a group, you put your layer in the group, and then you create a mask in that group.

I'll actually undo that (Command-Z because I want to load the selection that we made earlier, which you can do via Select > Load Selection > Alpha 1, or by holding Command and clicking on the Alpha 1 channel.

Once that's selected, we can go back to the group we created and click on the Mask button.

So now, even if I brush outside of that area, it's a mask within a mask, which is a neat little trick to keep your changes within the desired area.

I'll set the foreground color to white now, bring my opacity down to around 25%, and make my brush a little smaller by holding Option-Control. Now I can brush over her face to add some light. I'm trying to simulate the effects of the light from the light overlay we added, so I don't want to do too much. If I do it on the opposite side of the light instead of matching the light, it's going to feel like the light's wrong.

This is looking pretty good already. We can add more drama and coloring, but for now I want to add a glow, and this is using my glow actions.

To start that, let's go to the Cold-Light-Rays-60 layer. I'm going to create a new group here and call it "Glow". Now switch to the Elliptical Marquee tool.

Let's create a circle. Hold down the Alt key to grow from center, and the Shift key to constrain proportion so it's a perfect circle. And then I'll move it to follow the shape of her shoulder blades a little bit.

I'll create a new layer and call it "Circle". Make sure the foreground color is white and then go to Edit > Stroke.

Add a 25 pixel white stroke on the center and hit OK.

Now we can deselect our selection. Now, if you've gotten my glow actions, then you just double-click on the file and it'll show up in your actions. So let's go to Window > Actions.

You should now see the glows. The first one I want to do is a tight glow. So, with your layer selected of whatever you want to glow, click on tight glow and hit play.

It'll then prompt you to select the color, which you can also adjust later. In this case, I'd like a warm, orangey color, and that looks decent.

Now I want to do a second glow so that we have multiple colors in here. So I'm going to go here. And in this case I will use a wide glow.

Again, you'll be prompted to select a hue, and I'm going to pick a blue.

So now I have my two glows. Let's put the circle layer at the top so it's in front. Then the tight orange glow is next followed by the wide blue glow.

It's currently too strong so we're going to adjust it. Let's lower the opacity of the warmer glow.

Now let's lower the opacity of the blue glow. This gives us an effect of an orange glow in the middle that turns blue as it goes out, which is the effect I wanted to create.

We can turn up the opacity of the orange glow just a bit to make it a little stronger.

Now we can add effects to the glow. The first and most obvious one is that the glow should be mostly behind her, not on top of her. So let's go ahead and load our selection by holding the Command key and clicking the Alpha 1 channel again.

Then we'll invert the selection (Select > Inverse or Command-Shift-I), which will make it so we are selecting the background. Finally, I'm going to select the circle layer and create a mask.

So now the circle is not in front of her. The reason I didn't do it for all three (the circle and the two glow effects) is because I want some of the glow to come in front of her, but not all. So the glows I'm going to do manually by selecting each one and then creating a mask for it.

I'll start by hiding the blue glow to just show the orange one. I'll switch to the brush tool, make sure the foreground color is black since black conceals, and set the opacity to 61%.

Now I can just brush some of that orange glow out. I want some of it to be in front, but not too much.

We'll do the same thing on the blue glow.

We can also play around with the smoke. Duplicate the smoke layer by dragging it down to the new layer button, and then let's bring that on top of the orange glow.

And then by holding down the option key, hovering between the layers, and clicking, you create what's called a clipping mask so the smoke only goes on top of the orange glow layer.

Right now, the glow is probably a little too bright and it's in the Multiply blending mode. Let's try a different blending mode like Darker Color. When we switch to this blending mode, you can see that it added some of that smoke into the glow, which is nice.

I think the Darker Color mode is the best we're going to get. If the color is too strong, we can go back to our Camera Raw Filter on the smoke and turn the saturation down.

We can also turn the temperature a little bluer and see how that affects it.

It's not bad, but it is a little too strong, in my opinion. We can raise the opacity to fix this, since in the Darker Color blending mode the higher the opacity the more it'll darken the colors.

The glow does also look a little too uniform, so we can adjust it. First we can lower the opacity on the circle layer.

Then let's create a new layer above the Circle layer. We can set our brush to 61% opacity, set our foreground color to white, and brush in some of the glow with manual strokes.

While this method does work, the effect is coming out too strong in my opinion. I think there's a better way to do this, so instead let's duplicate the tight glow layer.

If this broke the clipping mask, you can bring the smoke layer above the bottom tight glow layer, hold the Option key, and click between the layers to create that clipping mask again.

I want the new tight glow layer to be on top.

Now, I'll hide the entire top orange glow layer by filling the mask with black. You can do this by selecting the mask, making sure black is the foreground color, going to Edit > Fill, and hit OK with Foreground Color selected.

And I want to change the hue/saturation to just the pure whites. You can open these settings by expanding the top tight glow layer and double-clicking the hue/saturation smart filter.

With the hue/saturation settings open, set Lightness to +100 and click OK.

You can hide the tight glow layer with the black mask to see how strong that effect is. I'll leave it enabled.

And then by taking the Brush tool with a white brush at an opacity around 50%, I'm going to lighten some of the right side of the glow area.

This process is basically revealing some of that extra glow we added. I wanted some extra glow on this right side because it's the source of the light and because I didn't want the glow to be too uniform. We can also turn the opacity on this layer up to almost 100%.

That's pretty cool. I do feel like her face could be lit up a little more. So we can select that Background copy layer and paint in some of the mask again to lighten her face. It's not looking bad.

All right, I do want to do some overall corrections on this, so let's go to the very top layer and type Command-Shift-Option-E. What that does is create a new layer of everything that's here. If I want to affect everything at once, this is the easiest way. Right click that new layer and Convert to Smart Object.

And then let's open up Filter > Camera Raw Filter.

Here we'll be able to do some vignetting. We can play with the colors here a tad and see what we can get.

I'll make the temperature a bit bluer, increase the contrast and lower the highlights, and raise the shadows just a bit.

Now let's go ahead and add our vignetting manually. I do it with linear gradients. To do this, click the masking icon and then Linear Gradient.

I'll zoom out so we can see a bit better, and then I'll create a gradient by clicking and dragging from left to right.

I don't want to see the mask so I'll uncheck the "Show Overlay" box, and then I'll just lower the exposure.

I can now create a new mask using the "Create New Mask" button. Instead I will add a linear mask using the "Add" button under "Mask 1" and selecting Linear Gradient.

Then I can click and drag from the bottom of the image up.

We can do the same thing again and this time add a linear gradient from the top of the image down, at a slight angle. The goal here of these adjustments it to add extra shadows.

Then let's select "Create New Mask" and create a radial gradient and put it right over her face,

We'll make the feather really strong so that the gradient is very soft. I'll rotate the radial gradient a bit. Once again I'll uncheck the "Show Overlay" option to hide the mask, and then we can lighten her up even more by raising the exposure.

I want it to look like there's a light source in the upper-right-hand corner and like the glow itself is also lighting her face. We can add a little bit of texture and clarity, which usually adds some sharpness to the image. If we feel like the color is a little too blue, we can also bring the temperature a little warmer.

Now let's go back to our basic correction. There's another thing I like to do, which is that overall at the end, I want to change the color grading. So I want my highlights to be pretty warm, and my shadows to be pretty cool.

In the basic correction I also want to add some clarity overall, which will add it to the smoke as well in the background. I'll also add a little bit of texture.

And there we go. You can toggle the top layer off and on to see the difference that those overall changes made and see that it's a pretty dramatic transformation.

Conclusion

If you've been following along, you hopefully have a good handle now on how to use overlays, neural filters, depth maps, glow effects, and other special effects. You may need to practice these projects a few times, but hopefully they'll help you feel prepared to apply these concepts to your own work. I hope you liked this tutorial and that you learned something about using overlays in Photoshop, and if you did, you can find more on my YouTube channel, so please subscribe and share with your friends.

I'll see you all next time!