Trichromy Composite Image Tutorial

Go to File Open

Find and open your 3 images

Hold Ctrl (or Command on a Mac) and click on each image.

Then press “Open”.

While holding Ctrl, press “A” to Select All.

Hold Ctrl and press “C” to Copy.

Now go to another one of the images and hold Ctrl and press “V” to paste on top.

Notice that when you do this, a new layer will be created on top of the old photo.

Now repeat that step for your third image, so that you have all three images on the same file as individual layers.

Now unlock the “background” layer by double-clicking on it. A dialogue box will appear. Just click OK. This will unlock the “background” layer.

Now if your images were aligned at all (i.e. taken with a tripod so that background doesn’t change, but only the subjects in the photo in are different places), you can do auto alignment to match up points of commonality. This will perfectly align your photos automatically.

SAVE YOUR FILE!!!!!

Highlight all your layers by clicking on the top layer, holding down Shift and then clicking on the bottom layer.

Once you have all your layers highlighted, go to Edit Auto Align Layers.

This will open a dialogue box. It should be set to “Auto” under “Projection by default. Click OK. This will use points of commonality to align your photos with one another.

Once it’s done aligning, you can click the “Eye symbol” off (so that it disappears) on each layer to reveal the layer beneath. Click on each Eye to see if the photos are registered in a nice alignment. If done correctly, you shouldn’t notice the background of the images moves at all when you click on and off each layer’s “Eye symbol”; only the subjects in the photo (e.g. the people in your photo) should be in different places in the image.

SAVE YOUR FILE!!!!!!!!!!

Now click on your top layer, and click on the “Channels” tab next to the “Layers” tab above your layers.

If you click the Red Channel, you will see your image suddenly become black and white.

Right Click on the Red Channel. This will bring up the option to “Duplicate Channel”. Click “Duplicate Channel”.

This will bring up a dialogue box. Where it says “Document” click on the drop-down tab and select “New”.

Where it says “Name” type in: Red Channel, then click OK.

This creates a new tab at the top. Keep track of these and make sure not to delete them.

Now click the tab to go back on your file with the three layers of your three images.

Make sure you click back to the “Layers” tab, as you will still naturally be in the “Channels” tab.

Click to highlight the image you just duplicated in the Channels tab, and delete it (it’s okay; you’ve duplicated it, remember!?)

After you delete the top layer, it should be gone. This is an easy and clean way of working to ensure that you are working on the right layer and not duplicating the same image more than once. Make sure that after you delete the top layer, the visible image in the file changes.

Now repeat the same steps you’ve just done for the Red Channel, but now, with the next image, duplicate the “Green Channel” in the Channels tab. Remember to click “New” in the drop-down tab in the dialogue box.

Remember to delete that layer once you duplicate the green channel for that layer so that you are all ready to work on the last layer.

Repeat the same steps you just did to duplicate the Blue Channel in the Channels tab for the final image.

Once this is done, you should have three separate tabs at the top for those three images you duplicated with separate color channels.

Delete the original working file from which you have aligned all your images together to make for a clean and non-confusing work flow. Now you should only have your three images, in three separate tabs.

Next, clicking on each of your tabs (should be labels “Red Channel”, “Green Channel” and “Blue Channel”) go to Image Mode Grayscale.

Do this for each of your images (each separate tab) to convert them into a grayscale image.

Once this is done to each image (tab), then go to any of the

three images (tabs) and go to their Channel Tab,

and click on the upside-down triangle in the top right corner.

Then click on “Merge Channels”.

This will bring up a dialogue box. The “Mode” will be set to “Multichannel” by default. Click the drop-down tab to change it to “RBG Color”. Click OK

This will bring up another dialogue box. If you’ve done everything correctly up to this point, the three “Specified Channels” should be your three tabs/images. Click OK.

This will collapse all your tabs/images into one tab/image. Now is the time you can crop it if you wish or do any additional edits you wish to make to clean it up.

SAVE YOUR FILE!!!

DONE!