Stacking for multiple portraits

[Francis Fotography]

Greetings from the Gold Coast. I did this multiple image shot in photoshop years ago. Now as an Affinity convert I would like to do it again but can't find any tutorial on this. I don't even know what it's called. I tried stacking, erasing and painting out. Nothing seems to work. Any help would be very... helpful. Cheers.

 

[John Rostron]

I would guess that what you have here is a composite of five separate images, each with the girl in a different place. Presumably you have either the originals or a set of similar images.

You need to load the images into a stack ensuring that they are properly aligned. An images such as the one above would present no problems there because you have many strong edges for the alignment algorithm to work on. File> New Stack and add your images. Once they are loaded, go to the Layers panel, right click on the stack of images and select ungroup. This gives you a stack of properly aligned images.

Now set the visibility of all but the bottom two layers to hide, and select the one above the bottom and set the opacity to 50%. You can now erase those parts of this layer which are hiding the girl in the bottom layer. Once this is done, bring up the opacity of this working layer to 100%.

Now move up a layer. Set the visibility to show and the opacity to 50% and proceed as before showing two girls below. The only problem would be with the third girl, whose arm covers the leg of the second girl. You would need to be very precise in your erasure.

I have done this as a destructive process, but you may prefer to do it using a layer mask which would allow you to make corrections.

If you were feeling clever, you could make a selection of the  girl in each lower layer, save the selection (in a Channel) and apply it to all the other above layers in turn, then delete within that selection. Then repeat as needed.

If you would like to upload your images, then I would be happy to have a go for you, and record the process.

John

[Alfred]

27 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

Now move up a layer. Set the visibility to show and the opacity to 50% and proceed as before showing two girls below. The only problem would be with the third girl, whose arm covers the leg of the second girl. You would need to be very precise in your erasure.

Couldn’t you tackle that quite easily by including two copies of the second girl in the stack, and then erasing different parts of each copy?

[John Rostron]

36 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Couldn’t you tackle that quite easily by including two copies of the second girl in the stack, and then erasing different parts of each copy?

Good idea!

John

[Wosven]

Another solution is to add black masks to each layer but the bottom one, and paint in white each girl silhouette on the mask of each layer.

Edited February 10, 2019 by Wosven
Added screen shot

[John Rostron]

Yes, that

59 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Another solution is to add black masks to each layer but the bottom one, and paint in white each girl silhouette on the mask of each layer.

Yes, that would probably be simpler. The method I described was one I used some considerable time ago, before I got some experience of using masks.

John

[Francis Fotography]

Wow! The affinity community is really helpful. I'll get onto those techniques and let you know.

[John Rostron]

Note that when you are painting out or erasing or painting in (depending on your method) each girl, you do have some leeway around the subject except where they overlap as in the second and third girl. 

John