Crafting Double Exposures with Birgit Palma

Birgit Palma describes her creative process as, above all else, playful. So when we asked the Austrian-born and Barcelona-based artist, illustrator, and type designer to try out the new Logitech Craft Keyboard, she was game. We followed Birgit as she created a double exposure image with the new keyboard to see how it impacted her process.

Birgit started the double-exposure project as she always does – by finding two images that, on their surface, have nothing to do with one another – and imagining how she could invent a new visual story by merging them together in one composition. For this project she landed on the idea of blending the organic shapes of a portrait with the whimsical architecture of a Russian church.

After quickly masking and layering the selected images, Birgit began messing around in Adobe Photoshop CC. “My way of working includes a lot of playing around, I try out a million things just to see if I like the outcome. Craft’s input dial invites me to play – it’s easy to achieve different effects, opacities, brush sizes just by turning the Crown. It’s possible to test different effects in a faster way, it saves time and gives me a new layer of creative control.”

After settling on a rough composition, she works on the details that help transform the two images into one. “I then used the Crown to change the opacity of the top picture, the building, and to toggle through the Blend Modes I’d use for the Double Exposure.”

Birgit refined the piece with some gentle retouching – using the analog input dial to enlarge and shrink the brush size as she moves around the composition. And even though she’s quite far along in the process, Birgit is still, as she would put it, “playing around”.

“I still wasn’t sure if the piece would be black & white or color, so I just used the Crown to play with saturation to see what feels better. As a last step, I use a levels layers to give it the final accents and to create that fluent double-exposure effect.”

Birgit found that Craft and it’s input dial enhanced her experience creating in Photoshop. “Next to helping achieve a great deal of concentration it requires playful interaction. It’s refreshing to work with an element which is more sensitive and allows you to use it in different ways by turning & tapping. I’m working nearly 100% digitally, but I like the possibility of gaining more creative control outside the screen by using new techniques.”

Logitech will be in booth 205 at Adobe MAX 2017, demoing the new CRAFT Advanced Keyboard. Conference attendees, as well as design enthusiasts at home, can win one of 10 exclusive double exposure prints from Palma and a CRAFT keyboard during the show on Logitech’s Facebook and Twitter pages and each day in the booth. Adobe Creative Resident Jessica Bellamy will also create works of art from the Logitech booth.

Adobe note:

To provide a tight integration with the Adobe Creative Cloud, the Logitech team turned to the rich set of SDK and API services offered by the Adobe Creative Cloud Platform. Go to Adobe.io for more information.