Texture: Metal Art

I found this technique at this site: Photoshop Tutorials

It is pretty fun and the directions are well written. If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

This is my husband on our field course this summer. He loves his alligator tooth hat :)



These next two are some pretty flowers that cover Colorado in the fall. This time, instead of selecting the white area I selected the black area.

Making your own textures

There are a ton of resources online for textures. The two websites I have used in the past are not working right now, so I thought I would show you how to make your own textures. You can pretty much take a picture of anything and use it as a texture: concrete, wood, leaves, grass, fabric, flowers, etc.

In this example I used a picture I took of some hydrangeas. The original image was pink, and I wanted to keep the colors of the image I was texturizing, so I changed the hydrangeas to grayscale. This allowed the colors in the doggy picture to show through instead of having a pink tint to them.







These are two pictures of textures I took in Portland. The sand on the beach was blowing so hard and making these cool criss-cross patterns. It makes a nice subtle texture that I used in last weeks picture of my father-in-law.

Texture

I tried some textures with people pictures, let me know what you think.

Textured Kitty

I added a metal texture that covered half of the picture and set it to overlay. I wanted the kitty to be more detailed than the background, so I didn't want a lot of texture over her. After placing the texture I applied a layer mask to the texture layer. With the layer mask highlighted in the layer box and using the gradient tool (it's an option under the paint bucket tool), i drew a line through the middle of the picture, horizontally, from left to right. This helped blend the layer into the background.


I did the same with a pottery texture, but this time I set it to hard light. Play around with the layer modes. I ended up choosing hard light because soft light didn't let the texture show through as much.


Finally I added a silk texture that I desaturated. This time I let it cover the entire image and set it to soft light. The finished product is a cute little miss.

Texture Day

I was going to try textures with people pictures, but I didn't have any good ones on this computer. Maybe next week I'll try. This weeks texture is very similar to last weeks. I chose three textures, resized them to fit my picture, and then used the move tool to put them on my picture. The top two textures I set to soft light, and the bottom texture was set to overlay. Before adding textures I brightened the picture up a bit with the curves adjustments.

Original:


textured:


textures used:


Get in on the fun and try it yourself. I want to see what you can do with textures and your pictures.

Texture Day

Last night was Wicked night, and God loves me. I was supposed to leave, by myself, at 6pm to go downtown for Wicked. At 5:30pm Derek's office mate said that he was offered a ticket but had turned it down. After calling a bunch of people that he knew we found an extra ticket at about 5:45 and picked it up at 6, just in time. So I ended up not going by myself and got to go with my hubbie. It was awesome, and I definitely want to see it again sitting closer.

Now for today's texture picture.

original:

textured:

And this is how it was done:



I picked three textures and kept their color information (ie. didn't turn them into grayscale). Using the move tool (highlighted in the tools box), I moved them onto my picture. The textures may need to be resized to fit your picture, but in this case I didn't need to do any resizing. Two of them I set to soft light in the layers box and the other one I set to overlay. Play around with overlay, soft light, hard light, etc to see what you like best. Have fun!

Playing with Texture

I have been playing a little bit with texture in photoshop. Here is a very easy one that I did today. I get my textures from www.mayang.com/textures/. This is a picture of Smoky and Takota I took this winter. The picture was a little washed out so I messed with curves in lab color mode to bring out some color and contrast (Make sure you switch back to RGB mode when you are done). I then took a texture of some gouged dirt and made it the same size as my photo. Then I used the move tool (upper right hand corner of the tools) to move the texture into the photo. If you don't like the colors of the texture you can change it to grayscale to delete the color information. I then set the layer to overlay in the layers box and set the opacity to about 67%. Smokey's face didn't show up very well so I used the burn tool at about 19% to bring it out a bit. Not too compicated, but I like how it kind of makes the photo look old.

Takota is my aunt's new horse. He is a six year old mustang that can be very stubborn. He is also not very fond of having his picture taken. Smokey, on the other hand, was always posing for a shot. He would stop, look at me, and wait for me to take the picture before going back to chewing his grass.