Texture Tutorial

I was checking out other peoples self portraits this past weekend, and I saw a picture over at It’s Just how I see Things that was AMAZING. She took a picture of her hands holding a book and then she added a cool music note texture to the picture. Sounds simple, but the effect was stunning. Seeing the texture in that picture made me want to learn how to do that!

As you know, I am new to photography and I had NO idea how I would go about doing this. So I took to the net and found out how to do it:) Keep in mind I just learnt how to do this myself, so am NO expert – but if you want to try to add texture – here’s how I did it.

In Photoshop open the picture you are wanting to add texture to:

Then open the picture of the texture you want to add. I found a lot of cool, free textures over at Bittbox’s Flickr account.

Once you have both images open, click on the texture image and drag it onto your original picture:

Now go to Edit and select Transform, and then select Scale (or you could hit Ctrl, Alt, T) to resize the texture layer. Drag it out to be the same size as as your original image. Once you have it the size you want, hit Enter.

Next go over to the right hand layer menu, and select the box that says Normal.

I changed mine to Overlay, but play around with the options and choose the one you like best. You can also adjust the Opacity of the layer on that same menu. I left mine at 100%.

I like how the image above looks, but I want some rougher texture to the image as well. So I repeated the above steps with a Chip Board texture, but set the Opacity on this layer to 80%.

Now that I’ve added that 2nd texture, it has made the image a little more orange/yellow which I don’t like.

In order to fix that, I went back over to the right hand layer menu. I right clicked on the background image, and selected Duplicate Layer.

Then I dragged the duplicated Background copy up to the top of the layers. I left this layer as Normal, and adjusted to Opacity to 55%.

BEFORE

I am happy with how that looks, so I flatten the layers. To flatten the image, so to the top menu bar and select Window, then chose Actions and Flatten Then I’m done!

BEFORE

AFTER

I had so much fun doing this, I decided to try adding a texture to my self portrait – I used a carpet texture on this one. I wish I had learnt how to do this before I submitted the self portrait, because I like it SOOO much better with the texture!

Go try adding textures to some of your pictures!