What you need
- A photo of yourself, standing straight and facing the camera, in fitted clothes. A full-length photo lets you check coats, dresses and trousers; waist-up is enough for tops.
- A picture of the garment on a plain background: the product photo from a shop, a screenshot of it, or your own photo of something you own. A ready-made transparent PNG is even better.
- The overlay tool or any photo editor with layers. The steps below are the same either way; the tool just has them in one place and keeps your photo on your device.
1. Start with a photo that lines up
Garment photos are almost always shot square to the camera, on a mannequin or laid flat. Your photo should match that as closely as you can: shoulders square to the lens, arms hanging a little away from your sides, phone held at chest or waist height rather than above your head. A three-quarter turn or crossed arms will defeat any overlay, because a flat cutout has no way to turn with you.
Wear something thin and close to the body, like a plain t-shirt and leggings or slim trousers. The overlay sits on top of what you are wearing, and a chunky hoodie underneath makes every garment look wider at the edges where the hoodie pokes out. There is a full checklist in how to take a photo for try-on.
2. Get the garment as a cutout
The garment needs a transparent background so only the garment lands on your photo. If you add a shop photo in the tool, it removes a plain background for you: it fills inward from the four corners and stops where the color changes, with a tolerance slider for how strict that is.
Some sources work much better than others:
- Invisible-mannequin shots (the garment looks worn by nobody) are ideal. They have the shape of a body and a plain background.
- Flat lays work for color, but the sleeves are often spread out sideways, so they read wider than the garment will look on you.
- Photos on a model are the hardest. The model's arms, neck and legs get cut out along with the garment, and the pose rarely matches yours.
If a shop lets you zoom into the product photo, take the screenshot zoomed in so the garment fills the screen. A clean edge matters more than resolution. For trickier images, making a transparent clothing PNG covers halos, holes and shadows.
3. Register it on your shoulders
Printers line up color layers using registration marks: small crosshairs printed in the same place on every sheet. Your shoulders are the registration marks for anything worn on the upper body. Get them right first, and size, position and length mostly fall into place.
- Drag the garment until its collar or neckline sits at the base of your neck.
- Resize it (pinch on a phone, the pink corner handle or the Size slider elsewhere) until the shoulder seams meet the outer edge of your shoulders. Ignore the sleeve edges; sleeves on mannequins hang at odd angles.
- Re-check the neckline. Resizing from the corner moves it slightly, so drag it back up if needed.
For skirts and trousers, the registration line is your waist: line the waistband up with where you would actually wear it (high-waisted pieces sit at the narrowest part of the torso, others lower) and size it to the width of your hips. For dresses, use the shoulders if it has them and the bust line for strappy styles.
Trust the shoulders over the overall width. A product photo of a size small on a mannequin and you in a size large will not share proportions, and squeezing the garment to fit your whole silhouette makes it look shrunken.
4. Tilt and flip
Very few people stand perfectly level. If one shoulder sits lower in your photo, rotate the garment by the same small amount; two or three degrees is often enough, and it removes most of the pasted-on look. Use the Rotate slider for fine control, or the square bracket keys on a keyboard.
Flip mirrors the garment left to right. It is useful when the light in your photo comes from the other side than in the product photo, so the shading on the garment agrees with the shading on your face, and for asymmetric pieces like a wrap dress when you want to see the tie on the other side. Remember that a mirror selfie is already flipped.
5. Read the length, carefully
With the shoulders registered, the hem tells you roughly where the garment would end on you. Compare it against fixed landmarks rather than eyeballing: the hip bone, the tips of your fingers with your arms relaxed, the top or middle of the knee, the widest part of the calf.
Two cautions. First, a mannequin shot shows the garment on the brand's sample size; a larger size is usually a little longer too, and your height changes everything. Second, a flat image cannot show a hem riding up over the hips or a coat swinging out from the shoulders. For a decision that hinges on an inch, the size chart's length measurement compared with a tape measure on your own body is more reliable than any picture.
A quick check that works: measure from your shoulder seam down your body to where you want a coat to end. If the shop lists a back length close to that number, the overlay and the measurement agree.
6. Opacity and Multiply
While you align, drop the opacity to around 50 to 60 percent. You will see your shoulders and waist through the garment, which makes registration much faster. Put it back to 100 percent before judging anything.
Multiply blends the garment the way a translucent ink sits on paper: the shadows and creases of your photo show through, and white parts of the garment let the photo underneath show. It is the fix for pale and white garments that otherwise look like a sticker, and it adds a little of your photo's real light.
It also has a catch. Multiply darkens everything by whatever is underneath, so a cream sweater multiplied over a black t-shirt turns charcoal, and any garment over a colored top shifts toward that color. Turn Multiply off when you are judging the color itself, or take your photo in a white or light grey top so the effect stays gentle.
7. Layering several garments
The tool stacks garments like sheets of acetate: each new one goes on top. Stack them in dressing order, with what you would put on first at the bottom: trousers or skirt, then the top, then the jacket or coat. Use the arrows in the layer list to bring a garment forward or send it back, and tap a layer's name to select it for adjusting.
Layering is where an overlay is unexpectedly handy: you can try three coats over the same dress in a minute, or see which of two skirts works with a sweater you already own. Just keep in mind that every layer is still flat. A tucked-in top or a jacket worn open is out of reach; the top layer simply covers what is beneath it.
8. Save and compare
Download PNG saves the picture at the full size of your photo. Save one image per option and flip between them in your phone's gallery; side by side on the same base photo is the fairest comparison, because the light and pose stay identical.
On a phone
Drag with one finger to move the selected garment and pinch with two to resize and rotate at the same time. Touching the photo outside a garment still moves the selected one, which helps when a garment is small. To scroll the page, touch outside the photo.
With a keyboard
Click or tab to the photo, then use the arrow keys to move (hold Shift for bigger steps), plus and minus to resize, square brackets to rotate and Delete to remove the selected garment.
In other photo editors
Any editor with layers can do the same job: open your photo, paste the cutout as a new layer, then use free transform for size and rotation and the layer blend mode for Multiply. The steps above carry over directly.
When an overlay is the wrong tool
An overlay can't drape fabric over your shoulders, put your hand back in front of a jacket, take off the t-shirt under a slip dress, or relight a garment for your room. If the question is how something will hang or cling on you, you need a method that redraws the photo instead of pasting onto it. Overlay vs AI try-on shows the difference on the same photos.