The 20 Best Double Exposure & Duotone Photoshop Action Sets

The double exposure effect, or duotone effect, is a photographic technique where two separate images are overlaid to create a single composite image. This technique has been used in traditional film photography for decades, but with the advent of digital cameras and photo editing software, it has become even more accessible.

If you’re looking to create a double exposure effect without having to manually adjust camera settings, Photoshop action sets are a great solution. They’re designed to streamline your workflow and save you precious time.

To help you get started, we’ve compiled a collection of the best double exposure and duotone effect Photoshop action sets. They will all enhance your photos and add a touch of creativity. With these tools at your fingertips, you can achieve new aesthetics in minutes and take your photography to the next level.

What is the Double Exposure or Duotone Effect?

Double exposure or duotone effects are creative techniques that can transform your photos into visually captivating and artistically expressive works.

Double exposure involves blending two images into one, creating a surreal and dreamlike composition. It’s often used to merge portraits with landscapes, nature, or other subjects, resulting in a striking and visually intriguing image.

Duotone effects, on the other hand, involve converting an image into two dominant colors, usually contrasting shades. This technique adds a bold and dramatic look to your photos, emphasizing certain elements and creating a strong visual impact.

To achieve these effects, photographers often turn to Photoshop actions. They provide the tools to control the blending of images for double exposure and customize the color tones for duotone effects.

Whether you want to create a mesmerizing double exposure or give your images a duotone makeover, these actions can help you achieve your desired artistic effects. Transform your photos into visually engaging and memorable compositions that tell unique visual stories.

Best Double Exposure & Duotone Actions for Creatives

Double Color Exposure Effect Photoshop Action

First in our collection is the Double Color Exposure Effect Photoshop Action. This action is powerful yet easy to use. It comes with six overlay effects and 27 gradient presets. You can apply the effects with just a couple of clicks, and it comes with a help file to help you troubleshoot should anything go awry along the way.

Double Color Exposure Effect Photoshop Action

Advanced Double Exposure Photoshop Action

The Advanced Double Exposure Photoshop Action is easy to use and established in well-organized layers so you can undo your work should you need to. This set comes with 18 mixable color presets and provides a text guide.

Advanced Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Double Exposure Glow Photoshop Action

Another option is the Double Exposure Glow Photoshop Action. This action makes it easy for anyone to add a glowing double exposure effect to your photos with a few clicks. The action has organized layers and comes with complete documentation.

Double Exposure Glow Photoshop Action

Double Exposure Photoshop Action

This double exposure Photoshop action seamlessly combines two photos to create a beautiful finished product. It’s customizable and includes a vintage effect, light leaks, and color grading options.

Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Four Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

Another Photoshop action you might want to consider is this, which includes four variations. It ideally works in medium to high-exposure photographs, comes with a help file, and is generally designed to be used quickly and efficiently.

Four Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

Double Exposure Photoshop Action

This Double Exposure Photoshop Action is a fantastic effect for your photos. After making that one click, you can add color tones, gradients, and more. It’s easy to use and can make a lasting impression by means of the end result.

Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Double Exposure Photoshop Action Kit

The Double Exposure Photoshop Action Kit allows you to create double exposure effects in many ways. With just one click, you can adjust the brightness, opacity, dodge, masks, gradients, and more. Plus, it comes with 30 textures and double exposure gradients, to boot.

Double Exposure Photoshop Action Kit

Double Exposure Photoshop Action

The Double Exposure Photoshop Action makes it super easy to create a double exposure effect on a whim. It only takes a few seconds to implement, and the end result is stunning. This action comes with 25 color scripts and custom colors. Plus, it’s fully layered, customizable, and comes with documentation. What more could you ask for?

Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Trendy Double Exposure Photoshop Action

This trendy action set is super easy to use and yields results you will be proud of. It has organized layers for easy use and comes with an illustrated guide and video tutorial.

Trendy Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Double Color Exposure Photoshop Actions

Another great option is The Double Color Exposure Photoshop Action set. This one makes it possible to add colorful double exposure effects to photos, text, graphics, and more. With one click, you can transform an image using seven different color styles.

Double Color Exposure Photoshop Actions

Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

This set of double exposure Photoshop actions includes a video tutorial and documentation that make getting started easy. It comes with several actions for blending two photos, and for adding effects to a single photo, adding depth of field, and adding chromatic distortion. It also comes with light effects, textures, and more.

Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

80 Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

Another choice to consider is this set of 80 double exposure Photoshop actions. They all work with a single click, and the set comes with instructions for their specific use.

80 Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

Color Double Exposure Photoshop Action

The Color Double Exposure Photoshop Action delivers professional results in a matter of minutes. It’s easy to use, fully editable, and grouped so that it can be used fast. It comes with 50 color presets, and you have control over each layer, so you can pick and choose which elements of the effect you want to use. Finally, this action is non-destructive, so your original images remain intact.

Color Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Double Exposure Glow Photoshop Actions

The Double Exposure Glow Photoshop Actions is just as solid an option as all others here. It can be implemented in a single click, has organized layers, and includes several adjustment settings for easier use. It’s easy to edit and provides documentation as well. Once added to your photos, you can enjoy a nice glow effect on top of a traditional double exposure.

Double Exposure Glow Photoshop Actions

Animated Parallax Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Here’s another excellent choice. Using two photos, the Animated Parallax Double Exposure Photoshop Action creates a parallax shift effect. It comes with four different shift styles and can be implemented with just a couple of clicks. It’s also fully layered and can be customized to suit your specific needs.

Animated Parallax Double Exposure Photoshop Action

AI Modern Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

You might also consider the AI Modern Double Exposure Photoshop Actions set. This set makes it easy to create double exposure artwork, and it uses AI to detect faces and produces stunning results. It uses well-organized layers that are completely editable, you can swap textures, and it comes with 30 high-resolution textures.

AI Modern Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

Premium Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Another option is the Premium Double Exposure Photoshop Action set. Everything is separated and has grouped elements for easier use. The result is stunning, offering a professional look that’ll make it seem like you spent hours trying to achieve it.

Premium Double Exposure Photoshop Action

Duotone Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

The last action in our collection is the Duotone Double Exposure Photoshop Actions set. This one requires selecting two images and then playing the actions all at once to achieve the desired effect. It comes with duotone effects, on which you can adjust the opacity. It also allows for balance between layers and is non-destructive, so your original images stay intact.

Duotone Double Exposure Photoshop Actions

How to Install Photoshop Actions

  1. Download and unzip the action file
  2. Launch Photoshop
  3. Go to Window > Actions
  4. Select Load Actions from the menu and go to the folder where you saved the unzipped action file to select it
  5. The Action will now be installed
  6. To use the newly installed action, locate it in the Action panel
  7. Click the triangle to the left of the action name to see the list of available actions
  8. Click the action you want to play and press the play button at the bottom of the Actions panel

Striking Double Exposure Effects

Each of these Photoshop actions is a fantastic option that can simplify your workflow and make editing your photos easier than ever. It can also transform your images into striking duotone or double exposure effects that will make a lasting impression.

The best part about these Photoshop actions is that they are fully customizable, allowing you to adjust the colors, opacity, and other variables to achieve your desired effect. So go ahead and try a few of them out to see which ones work best for you.

More Photoshop Action Collections

Related Topics

Here’s A First Look At Amazon Prime’s Fallout Series

After a series of vague teasers and press releases, we finally have a first real look at what Amazon Prime’s Fallout TV series is going to look like, courtesy of Vanity Fair. The images showcase all the classic iconography you’d expect from the series, including vaults, ghouls, and power armor.

Ella Purnell as Lucy

The Vanity Fair article goes on to give us the first concrete details of the show, thanks to an interview with co-creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who also created Westworld. The series will star Ella Purnell as Lucy, a “doe-eyed” woman who emerges from her vault with naivete and optimism but is forced to face the horrors of the wasteland. 

“Lucy is charming and plucky and strong,” Nolan says. “And then you see she’s confronted with the reality of, hey, maybe the supposedly virtuous things you grew up with are not necessarily that virtuous. If they are virtuous, they’re couched in a circumstantial virtuousness. It’s a luxury virtue. You have your point of view because you never ran out of food, right? You guys were able to share everything—because you had enough to share.” These harsh realities were drawn directly from the themes that drive the game series.

The show will also give us a closer look at Vault Boy, Fallout’s animated mascot, giving him an origin story of sorts. According to Todd Howard himself, “That was something that they came up with that’s just really smart.” He says the show does a good job of balancing the franchise’s signature comedy and violence.

Howard spoke to Vanity Fair on the creation of the show as well, saying he’s done lots of meetings about potential adaptations over the years, but nothing ever felt right. Once they were getting serious about it, he threw out a dream creator he wanted to work with. “I’d said to somebody—and I won’t say who—but I was taking a meeting with another producer, and said: ‘Before I talk to other people, I want to hear that Jonah Nolan says he’ll never do it.’” Obviously, Howard’s dream came true.

Walton Goggins as The Ghoul

And while we had an idea of who had been cast in the show, we now know what roles they’ll be playing. Moises Arias plays Lucy’s brother and Kyle MacLachlan is their father and the overseer of Vault 33. Out in the wasteland, Aaron Moten plays a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel, Sarita Choudhury is an unspecified leader, Michael Emerson is an “enigmatic researcher” named Wilzig, and Walton Goggins plays a ghoul, one of Fallout’s radiated, noseless people. The Ghoul, as his character is called, is identified as one of the main leads, alongside Moten and Purnell’s characters. The Ghoul is identified as the cynical foil to Lucy’s innocent character.

You can check out the rest of the images from the show below.

[Source: Vanity Fair] 

A new way to see the activity inside a living cell

Living cells are bombarded with many kinds of incoming molecular signal that influence their behavior. Being able to measure those signals and how cells respond to them through downstream molecular signaling networks could help scientists learn much more about how cells work, including what happens as they age or become diseased.

Right now, this kind of comprehensive study is not possible because current techniques for imaging cells are limited to just a handful of different molecule types within a cell at one time. However, MIT researchers have developed an alternative method that allows them to observe up to seven different molecules at a time, and potentially even more than that.

“There are many examples in biology where an event triggers a long downstream cascade of events, which then causes a specific cellular function,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology. “How does that occur? It’s arguably one of the fundamental problems of biology, and so we wondered, could you simply watch it happen?”

The new approach makes use of green or red fluorescent molecules that flicker on and off at different rates. By imaging a cell over several seconds, minutes, or hours, and then extracting each of the fluorescent signals using a computational algorithm, the amount of each target protein can be tracked as it changes over time.

Boyden, who is also a professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, as well as the co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Cell. MIT postdoc Yong Qian is the lead author of the paper.

Fluorescent signals

Labeling molecules inside cells with fluorescent proteins has allowed researchers to learn a great deal about the functions of many cellular molecules. This type of study is often done with green fluorescent protein (GFP), which was first deployed for imaging in the 1990s. Since then, several fluorescent proteins that glow in other colors have been developed for experimental use.

However, a typical light microscope can only distinguish two or three of these colors, allowing researchers only a tiny glimpse of the overall activity that is happening inside a cell. If they could track a greater number of labeled molecules, researchers could measure a brain cell’s response to different neurotransmitters during learning, for example, or investigate the signals that prompt a cancer cell to metastasize.

“Ideally, you would be able to watch the signals in a cell as they fluctuate in real time, and then you could understand how they relate to each other. That would tell you how the cell computes,” Boyden says. “The problem is that you can’t watch very many things at the same time.”

In 2020, Boyden’s lab developed a way to simultaneously image up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell. This approach, known as “spatial multiplexing,” allows researchers to distinguish signals for different molecules even though they may all be fluorescing the same color.

In the new study, the researchers took a different approach: Instead of distinguishing signals based on their physical location, they created fluorescent signals that vary over time. The technique relies on “switchable fluorophores” — fluorescent proteins that turn on and off at a specific rate. For this study, Boyden and his group members identified four green switchable fluorophores, and then engineered two more, all of which turn on and off at different rates. They also identified two red fluorescent proteins that switch at different rates, and engineered one additional red fluorophore.

Each of these switchable fluorophores can be used to label a different type of molecule within a living cell, such an enzyme, signaling protein, or part of the cell cytoskeleton. After imaging the cell for several minutes, hours, or even days, the researchers use a computational algorithm to pick out the specific signal from each fluorophore, analogous to how the human ear can pick out different frequencies of sound.

“In a symphony orchestra, you have high-pitched instruments, like the flute, and low-pitched instruments, like a tuba. And in the middle are instruments like the trumpet. They all have different sounds, and our ear sorts them out,” Boyden says.

The mathematical technique that the researchers used to analyze the fluorophore signals is known as linear unmixing. This method can extract different fluorophore signals, similar to how the human ear uses a mathematical model known as a Fourier transform to extract different pitches from a piece of music.

Once this analysis is complete, the researchers can see when and where each of the fluorescently labeled molecules were found in the cell during the entire imaging period. The imaging itself can be done with a simple light microscope, with no specialized equipment required.

Biological phenomena

In this study, the researchers demonstrated their approach by labeling six different molecules involved in the cell division cycle, in mammalian cells. This allowed them to identify patterns in how the levels of enzymes called cyclin-dependent kinases change as a cell progresses through the cell cycle.

The researchers also showed that they could label other types of kinases, which are involved in nearly every aspect of cell signaling, as well as cell structures and organelles such as the cytoskeleton and mitochondria. In addition to their experiments using mammalian cells grown in a lab dish, the researchers showed that this technique could work in the brains of zebrafish larvae.

This method could be useful for observing how cells respond to any kind of input, such as nutrients, immune system factors, hormones, or neurotransmitters, according to the researchers. It could also be used to study how cells respond to changes in gene expression or genetic mutations. All of these factors play important roles in biological phenomena such as growth, aging, cancer, neurodegeneration, and memory formation.

“You could consider all of these phenomena to represent a general class of biological problem, where some short-term event — like eating a nutrient, learning something, or getting an infection — generates a long-term change,” Boyden says.

In addition to pursuing those types of studies, Boyden’s lab is also working on expanding the repertoire of switchable fluorophores so that they can study even more signals within a cell. They also hope to adapt the system so that it could be used in mouse models.

The research was funded by an Alana Fellowship, K. Lisa Yang, John Doerr, Jed McCaleb, James Fickel, Ashar Aziz, the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Institutes of Health.

MIT’s Science Policy Initiative holds 13th annual Executive Visit Days

From Oct. 23-24, a delegation consisting of 21 MIT students, one MIT postdoc, and four students from the University of the District of Columbia met in Washington for the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s Executive Visit Days (ExVD). Now in its 13th cycle, this trip offers a platform where university students and young researchers can connect with officials and scientists from different federal agencies, discuss issues related to science and technology policy, and learn about the role the federal government plays in addressing these issues.

The delegation visited seven different agencies, as well as the MIT Washington Office, where the group held virtual calls with personnel from the National Institutes of Health and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. Visits to the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Environmental Protection Agency, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration then followed over the course of two days. The series of meetings, facilitated by the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI), offered a window into the current activities of each agency and how individuals can engage with science policy through the lens of each particular agency.

The Science Policy Initiative is an organization of students and postdocs whose core goal is not only to grow interest at MIT and in the community at large in science policy, but also to facilitate the exchange of ideas between the policymakers of today and the scientists of tomorrow. One of the various trips organized by SPI every year, ExVD allows students to gain insight into the work of federal agencies, while also offering the chance to meet with representatives from these agencies, many of whom are MIT alumni, and discuss their paths toward careers in science policy. Additionally, ExVD serves as an opportunity for participants to network with students, postdocs, and professionals outside of their fields but united by common interests in science policy. 

“I believe it is critical for students with vital technical expertise to gain a sense of the realities of policymaking,” says Phillip Christoffersen, a PhD student researching AI in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and SPI ExVD 2023 chair. “Due to the many complexities of modern life, we are simultaneously reaching tipping points in many fields — AI, climate change, biotechnology, among many others. For this reason, science and science policy must increasingly move in lockstep for the good of society, and it falls on us as scientists-in-training to make that happen.”

One example of the delegation’s visits was to the White House OSTP, located directly next to the West Wing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This special agency of fewer than 200 staff, most of whom are either in rotation or on loan from other federal agencies, directly reports to the president on all matters related to science and policy. The atmosphere at the White House complex and the exchanges with Kei Koizumi, principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, deeply inspired the students and showcased the vast impact science can have on federal policy.

The overall sentiment among the ExVD participants has been that of reborn motivation, having become inspired to participate in policy matters, either as a portion of their graduate research or in their future career. The ExVD 2023 cohort is thankful to the MIT Washington office, whose generous support was crucial to making this trip a reality. Furthermore, the delegation thanks the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s leadership team for organizing this trip, enabling an extremely meaningful experience.