Double Exposure effect in Unity with the Standard Assets

Double exposure or multiple exposure is a technique used in photography and cinematography to super impose multiple exposures in to the same image.

A high contrast exposure of a person + exposure of a city skyline

© Erkin Demir

In Unity 5 it is really easy to achieve this effect with the image effects that are supplied in the Standard Assets. All you need is the Screen Overlay effect and optionally Contrast Enhance and Grayscale effect or something like the Color Correction Curves effect

Setup

Setup a scene (add models etc.) or use an existing scene. Then import the image effects package either by going to Assets->Import Package->Effects or if it is not there go the the asset store search for “Standard Assets” and download and import the package.

Select the Main Camera and add the Screen Overlay script.

Change the Blend Mode in the screen overlay script to Additive and add a texture. I’ve used a stock image from this link: https://stocksnap.io/photo/5D50AWZ696

The result is something like this:

In order to improve the effect and get something like the first picture you first need to set the Clear flags in the Camera script to Solid Color and change the background color to something bright.

Add the Greyscale and Contrast Enhance script, make sure that the screen overlay effect is last in the component order. Your effects stack should resemble this.

In the Contrast Enhance script set the Intensity to 1, Threshold to -0.5 and the Blur Spread to 15.

The result

You can play with the parameters to get your desired result. Try replacing the Greyscale script with a color correction script and play around to see what can be achieved.

In the next post I will show you how to use the output of a second Camera instead of using a texture. So you can maybe create a cool intro in your game similar to the intro of the HBO serie True Detectives.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxXRkqXfhYM