ADD TEXTURES TO YOUR IMAGES


Photographers have always used textures in their pictures and in the DDBD (Dark Days Before Digital) we would apply texture negatives under the enlarger to print with our pictures. This was a bit of a hit and miss affair at the best of times, but with digital, and especially the flexibility offered by Layers, we now have endless options and an infinite degree of precise control for fine-tuning the effect we're after.

 

Photoshop and Elements come with a good supply of textures, which you'll find by opening an image and going to Filter > Texture > Textures. Burlap, brick, sandstone and canvas are there as standard, but hit Load Texture and navigate through Presets to Textures, and you'll find loads more to play with. The Scaling and Relief sliders change the effect of the chosen texture and you'll find it really useful to take some time to explore what's on offer.
Once you've got the hang of what the textures do, you'll find it even more fun to make your own by either scanning or shooting suitable subjects. If you want, you can add your custom made textures to Photoshop's armory, so you can access them in exactly the same way.

Creating your own textures

Textures are all around us - we just need to school ourselves to look for them. After a while this becomes second nature, once we are aware how useful they can be.

Dried mud on a parched riverbed is almost a picture on its own, but will work wonderfully as a texture with the right subject. Similarly, a rock face, tree bark, crumpled paper or even feathers all make great textures.

When you're out with your camera (or in with your scanner) look for subjects that have enough detail to enhance a picture, but not so much that they'll overpower it.

 

Textures can be applied in a variety of ways, but here's the general principle . To apply a photographed or scanned texture we need to drag and drop the texture onto the image.

 

We can do that by opening up both images like those below onto the Photoshop Elements screen and selecting our Move tool from the top right of the toolbox.

Click into the texture and drag it into the image as we demonstrate below.

 

We can then use the Move tool to position the texture over the image. If we open up our Layers palette from the palette well we will see the two layers, one on top of the other.

Once we have our texture positioned over our image the rest is experimentation and here is where the fun starts. Check out the blend modes in the drop down box within the layers palette.

Try running through them all and look at the effect each one has on the combined layers. However, don't write off the effect too quickly as it pops up on screen. We can adjust the effect of the blend by reducing the opacity of our texture layer via the slider at the top right of the layers palette.



A blend mode that looks awful with one combination of images can look great with another so experimentation is the key. A good tip is to remember that we can always copy another texture layer or the basic image to our layered stack to make a third layer. With a third layer at the top we can erase parts of that layer to bring detail back just where we want it.

We can also apply textures in other ways. Select the texture layer by clicking into that layer and select the elliptical lasso tool from the toolbar. We can then draw out an oval shape over the texture and we have marked ours in red so it can be seen more easily.

We can then select Edit > Cut from the toolbar and our image below our texture is revealed through an oval cut.

We could add a degree of feather to our selection first, via Select > Feather and in our example 50 pixels of feather was added.

A better, but more time consuming way is to select our polygonal lasso tool and make a selection around the edges of the dried mud. Select Edit > Cut and our image now has much more impact.

 

We can also experiment with layer blend modes and from within the layers palette, selecting hard light for a different effect.

Making custom textures for Photoshop and Elements

Here's how to add your own creations to the texture filters already in Photoshop or Elements.
Scan or shoot your texture like our crumpled piece of paper and resize it to about 7x7in at 72ppi

Change the Mode to Greyscale (Image > Mode > Greyscale) and save it as a Photoshop (.psd) file type in a new folder on your desktop or hard drive. The path to Photoshop's own textures is C:\program files\adobe\Photoshop elements\presets\textures which is quite a laborious route.

Try your texture via Load Texture in the Textures filter and in our example all we used was crumpled paper.

When creating some textures we can sometimes find that a line appears across the image when they are applied as you can just see below.

This is because as Photoshop repeats our texture across the image the joins do not match well enough. One way around this is to open our texture in Photoshop elements and with our Rectangular Marquee tool select either the top or bottom half of the texture.

We can use our rulers to help us by hitting Ctrl+X.
From the Edit menu we can select Edit > Copy and then Edit > Paste and then Edit >Paste again to make two copies. We can see those copies in the layers palette and we can turn off the original layer as we no longer need it as shown below.

From the menu bar we need to select Image > Rotate > Flip Layer Vertical and with the move tool selected from the toolbar match the two parts together in the centre rather like a kaleidoscope. Then flatten your texture and save.

If we now add our texture via our filters menu it will work fine. This texture was scanned from a box that housed a B-B-Q from our local D.I.Y store, which again indicates that experimentation is the key here. Try anything as a texture, it only takes a minute to scan it.