Overlays have a reputation problem. Mention them to a certain type of Photoshop purist and you’ll get the same look you’d get if you showed up to a dinner party in a novelty t-shirt. Too many people have used them badly, slapping light leak PNGs over photos and calling it “cinematic” when it looks more like a screensaver from 2003.

But here’s the thing: overlays are just raw material. The technique is in how you handle them. I’ve been doing composite work for clients for a few years now, and the composites I’m proudest of almost always have at least one overlay buried in the layer stack doing something subtle and structural. The ones I’m least proud of are usually the ones where I rushed and treated overlays like a finishing sprinkle instead of a building block.

Which is why when I came across this tutorial from Kelvin Designs, it landed. It’s not about making things sparkly. It’s about building a workflow that scales from simple to genuinely impressive.

Setting Up Before You Touch a Single Overlay

Kelvin starts by walking through workspace setup and Photoshop Libraries, and I’d encourage you not to skip this part even if it feels administrative. Libraries are one of those features I ignored for an embarrassingly long time, and once I started using them for recurring assets like overlays, textures, and logo variants, my file management went from chaotic to functional almost overnight.

The setup he recommends puts your overlay assets somewhere accessible and linked, not buried in a folder you’ll forget the path to. If you’re working from a coffee shop on a laptop with limited screen real estate (speaking entirely from personal experience here), having a clean Library panel open rather than hunting through Finder or Explorer every time is genuinely time-saving.

Applying Your First Overlay: The Blending Mode Is Doing the Work

The first project Kelvin builds is deliberately simple, one overlay, one subject, get it working. He applies the overlay on a layer above the base image and uses blending modes to integrate it. The key move here is trying Screen or Add for light-based overlays (like bokeh, flares, or atmospheric haze) because those modes ignore dark pixels and let only the light information through. This is why a black-background overlay can sit on top of your image without the black showing.

He also uses Free Transform (Cmd/Ctrl + T) to reposition and scale the overlay so it interacts meaningfully with the subject rather than just floating generically over the frame. This sounds obvious but it’s the step most people skip. The light should appear to come from somewhere logical. If your subject is lit from the left, your overlay shouldn’t have a hot spot on the right.

Masking Out What Doesn’t Belong

Once you’ve got an overlay positioned and blended, the next layer of control is masking. Kelvin demonstrates removing overlay elements that land in places that break the illusion, like a bokeh circle sitting directly over a face at full opacity when it should read as behind the subject.

The workflow here is clean: add a layer mask to the overlay, paint black with a soft brush at reduced opacity (he works around 30 to 50 percent in most cases) over areas where the overlay should recede. You’re not trying to erase it entirely in those spots, just push it back visually. The result is an overlay that feels three-dimensional, like it exists in the same space as your subject rather than on top of them.

Building Complexity: Multiple Overlays and Glow Actions

The later projects in the tutorial stack multiple overlays and introduce Kelvin’s Glow Actions, which are Photoshop actions that automate a sequence of adjustments to create a glowing, luminous effect. I won’t pretend I’m not going to use these, because I absolutely am.

The multi-overlay section is where the tutorial gets instructive beyond the basics. He shows how overlays can work against each other if you’re not thoughtful, and how to use them in complementary pairs. One overlay might add atmospheric depth, another adds specular highlights. They need to occupy different tonal or spatial territory or they’ll fight each other and muddy the image.

The shadow overlay section uses neural filters and displacement with depth maps to wrap a shadow realistically over a subject’s form. Depth map displacement is one of those techniques that sounds intimidating but is mostly just pointing Photoshop at the right layer and letting it do the math. The neural filter generates a depth map from your subject image, you use that as the displacement source, and suddenly your shadow bends around shoulders and cheekbones instead of sitting flat.

Where I’d Push Back (or at Least Push Further)

The one place I’d extend this for my own work is in using adjustment layers to color-match overlays more aggressively. Kelvin keeps the overlays fairly true to their original color temperature, which works well for his aesthetic. But in editorial or product compositing, I’ll often clip a Hue/Saturation or Color Balance adjustment directly to the overlay layer so it picks up the exact color cast of the rest of the scene. An overlay that’s slightly too warm or cool reads as fake even when the blend mode and opacity are perfect. Matching color temperature is the last 10 percent that makes the first 90 percent believable.

The single biggest lesson from this tutorial is that overlays are a compositing ingredient, not a filter. Treat them with the same intentionality you’d give to a lighting decision or a color grade, and they’ll stop looking like something you grabbed off a free assets site in a hurry.

Watch the full Kelvin Designs tutorial for the visual walkthrough, especially the depth map displacement section, which is much easier to follow when you can see the panels moving in real time: How To Use Overlays in Photoshop. You can also grab the free overlays he uses from kelvindesigns.com to follow along directly.