Confession time!! It seems like I confess a lot of my photographic shortcomings on this blog, so I will probably NEVER make it as a professional photographer … but here comes another confession.
I started using textures because my camera has horrible horrible horrible noise control. Anytime I put my camera over ISO 200, I have noise.
Bad noise.
Lots of noise.
Noisy noise.
So when I discovered textures, I did a jig simply because it covers the noise!! But then textures can also completely change an image. It can change an image’s meaning and tone. It can make something happy become very dreary. It can turn a blurry image into something artistic.
And here’s my very non-professional tutorial on adding textures to images using Adobe Photoshop Elements. I’m currently using 5.0 because I just don’t have the extra money to upgrade to the latest version, so if I can do it in 5.0, anyone can do it!
I’m going to skip the processing, because it doesn’t really matter how you process an image in order to use textures. In that case, I’ll start with an image that I’ve already processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
I am going to use some of my recent favorite textures by Patti Brown / Kaleidoscope to demonstrate, but I’ll add a list of some of my favorite places for free textures at the end of this post. The pro to buying textures is that you are getting the original image, so you will always have it. I find myself using a texture I found online and then not remembering where I got it — the textures that I buy are always there. And easier to look through.
1. Open the image in Photoshop.
2. Open the textures that you want to use … in this case, I am using the following Patti Brown textures:
1. Vintage Dream Burst – Dream Collection
2. Vintage Dream Sequence III – Dream Collection
3. Dustclouds – The Gallery Collection
4. Seafoam Vignette – The Gallery Collection
The following steps are completely open to interpretation. What I do is solely based on how it looks, and it will look completely different on another image. The fun part of textures is the playing around to find something that looks good.
3. Simply drag the first layer you want to use onto the image.
I actually don’t like drag-sizing the texture to fit the image, so I re-size the textures based on the size of the image, and I always go over by about 10px. Simply put, if my original image is 800px x 600px, then I’ll resize the texture to 810px x 610px before I drag it onto the original image.
4. Change the “blending mode” for the layer – I usually use either “overlay” or “soft light” as my two main blending modes.
5. Then, change the “opacity” to suit your desires. Sometimes, you can leave it at 100%; sometimes, you may only need it around 20% – it’s all about personal preference here.
6. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your layers.
I used the following combinations:
1. Vintage Dream Burst – overlay @ 80%
2. Vintage Dream Sequence III – overlay @ 50%
3. Dustclouds – overlay @ 40%
4. Seafoam Vignette – soft light @ 70%
Once you get all of your layers on there, you can go back and change the blending mode and opacity for each layer to create different looks.
Just go to your layer control box, select the texture you want to change, and then make your adjustments. It’s fun to play around.
You can also “hide” each texture to see how the image looks with or without that texture. Just click on the “eye” next to the texture in the layer control box.
When you’re all done with your layers and happy with how they look, then you can “flatten image” and save it out.
There is a whole different method for using layers on portraits, so I’ll cover that in a different post. It involves a lot of erasing the texture over the skin since you usually don’t want someone’s face looking bumpy or scratchy.
I’ve already sang the praises of Patti Brown’s textures, and I really love Florabella textures as well, but here are just a few of my favorite places for free textures.
Flickr
Les Brumes
Pareeerica
Web
Grunge Textures
Deviantart
Enter to win a set of Patti’s amazing textures at I Heart Faces!!
