Applying Textures to Enhance your Photography with Leslie Nicole

[Music] hey everyone hey hey we are joined by a wonderfully talented Leslie from french-kiss collections as well hey Leslie hey Leslie hi hi absolutely our pleasure it is yeah what are you going to be sharing with the design community today well I'm going to be showing kind of several images and kind of talking about my thoughts on using textures different methods of using textures different ways you might use textures and it'll do a few quick demos and show a few examples kind of showing some of my secret sauce another secret but their secret sauce ever licensed secret sauce kind all right all right let me get into awesome I'm gonna go into Lightroom first get out of library okay I'm first just gonna go through kind of an overview and I'm doing this in lightroom i made quicktime slides but they look so much better in lightroom so I'm doing a Lightroom and that way I can also quickly open up files if I need to so first I'm gonna kind of go over some before and afters there were some people that asked me beforehand what my approach was what my photographs looked like before I put textures so I've put that here and I'm going to bring those up we're gonna go fullscreen can everyone see that okay yep great so I kind of think of there being two approaches using textures that's a very simplified actually there's really three you can use textures as background that's where you totally cut everything out and paste it to the background but when we talk about textured photographs we're talking about using blend modes so that your texture is actually blending in and interacting with your photograph and I kind of think of that in a simplified way two approaches you can apply a texture to a photograph that's in an environment that maybe has a color and it really just brings a little bit of texture and tone to the image and you can do beautiful artistic things this way but it's a more it's usually a more subtle effect and this one I photographed a zinnia with a macro lens as a cannon macro 60 millimeter and with macros in general and especially for textures you really want to have that blurred background you have the best experience using textures with a really nice blurred background I think I was like f4 on this and the background was far enough away that you've got enough blur on there okay it's really beautiful I like the photo and the texture absolutely another way I use textures is to just add a little bit of enhancement or on the edges here I photograph this against a vintage satin curtain so you're already getting some kind of nice texture and movement and then I just use the textures to kind of create a textured vignette on this photograph to kind of vignette it with textures all right now the next approach is what I like to think of it is using textures as paint and before Photoshop before digital and I did analog back then hand coding was very popular and I was a professional hand colorist so I used to paint with my photographs so I think if textures is adding paint to my photograph and I did have a question this week about do I photograph with a white background and I often do I'll often use a white background too in anticipation of using textures and one thing I really want to talk about is that I would often get questions people say well how did you cut out how do you cut out your images and the thought is that I'm pasting these images onto a background and if you're doing the textures right this is actually it's not cut out it's blended in and I'm going to open that up later and show you so my own I love I mean I love textures I mean I love photography from straight - heavily textured but my own wheelhouse tends to be images that are very textured I like pushing the limits of between a photographer DeGraff and an illustration but you don't have to go that way this is one of my customers Julie molt a molt and she does beautiful work and this is the same exact texture but in her usage it's very soft and delicate so she would have probably used like a soft light opacity very low opacity and a lot of masking whereas on mine I'm using a multiply blend mode and it's a high opacity and lightly masked stunning this is yeah that's what I love about these textures they're so versatile you can go like super heavy mixed-media in-your-face artistic or it can just be a nice kind of delicate embellishment sure it's great I mean you can just put like a tiny touch of texture or you can just really you know push the limits and here's another example just photographing against white and adding a texture and that's not totally masked I mean there's a little bit of masking of course you want to clean up the whites and the some of the petals but it's not like the stem has hardly any masking you're all on it nice now here's an example where I'm really pushing that idea of painting with textures I don't know if you can see down at the bottom of this on the left the before I just basically put an old picture frame upside down on my table put some cardboard down and photograph this the background is the backside of a painting so it's just like some linen and what I want you to look at is the bottom down here where I've used the texture as in the normal blend mode to bring to really cover up and kind of really the textures becoming part of the actual scene and you thinking this one too that I've cut everything out and of course I did clean up a fair amount in highlights but it's not you know it's not a cutout these are blended it's beautiful with the background it's not a white background but it's a plain background and with the idea of using textures and here I've used two textures from the glorious grunge collection and I've also used an overlay and I'm going to open that one up maybe well I'm not sure my to open that whatever not we'll see okay and so here I've shot a basic still life and I just used textures to kind of give a little bit more of that vintage feel to the already vintage feel and I am going to open this one up and show you a little bit of how I did that using both the multiply blend modes and the normal blend modes yeah it's beautiful and here's another example where I've I've used an overlay from the crack unit collection and I did have a question this week of when I might use textures versus over light overlays and over noise are basically I think of overlays as you know files that have transparency so they're usually a lighter feel to them so this overlay basically I'm getting this been color vignette vignetting and a little bit of this crack euler effect but it's really not doing it's not really covering up the image okay and this is an image we're gonna we're gonna demo it's the most challenging one and we're lots going on I really pushed I really pushed that on line between photograph and illustration it's nice this is in your photograph because it's it's a really nice introduction because pretty simple and if you're new to textures would be a nice way to jump in and using a nice technique so let me find that file so my workflow is that I start in Lightroom I do my basic edits and Lightroom I kind of get my basic lighting dialed in if there's heavy burning and dodging I do that in Lightroom first I'm working on my raw my RAW images let's see I'm gonna go over here to my raw this is my raw image I'm going to go into the develop mode and like and okay I'm gonna use the backslash key and you can see the before and you can see it was pretty dark that was my total raw exposure of my raw image with no edits to it and what I've done here is I up the exposure by 20 plus 25 I decreased the highlights a little bit because I know that I'm going to increase by increasing exposure overall I know I'm going to be adding contrast and textures and I don't want any of those to get blown out so I just pulled back those highlights a little bit I pulled up my shadows a little bit and on the curves I pull the mid-tones a little bit up and so it's just really a basic edit before I come into Photoshop okay so now I come into Photoshop I'm going to do command or control if you're on a PC to go into Photoshop okay so my first we're in Photoshop now and my first job is to clean up the image I don't really like doing cloning in Lightroom I prefer to do it in Photoshop so I'm gonna first go in and doing a cloning I'm gonna do a quick one today I'm not gonna do a really detailed one because let me zoom up to a hundred percent I see a little bug bear little Ethan or something so I'm gonna select my Spot Healing Brush and just hit J to get down on the keyboard and just just quick swipe and get rid of him and I would just go through and kind of get any little pollen dust that's distracting let's go back to full frame and there's a little corner on the right hand side here that's bothering me it's pulling my eye away so I'm gonna select my lasso tool that's L in the keyboard and I'm just gonna do a quick selection and this is a great candidate for the excuse me for the content-aware fill so I'm gonna do shift delete bring up that dialog box and if content-aware isn't open it's in this dialogue box right here this one is this case where it's gonna work it should work perfectly and it does I'm just gonna deselect that boom oh that's so much better hmm yeah okay so I'm gonna I usually like thoroughly go through and make sure I don't have any little spots and stuff but I'm not gonna do that today we're just gonna jump into the next stage of my editing I'm a huge fan of filters I know you could probably do a lot of this in Lightroom but I think each person kind of has their jam and you know I like I like filters I'm a big fan of the Topaz labs filters I use clarity on almost everything I do so I need to duplicate my layer to do that filter so I'm gonna do command J that's gonna be control J on a PC to duplicate my layer and then I'm gonna go filter topaz studio clarity now I already know that I tend to really like the preset that's for flowers so I'm just gonna write it right to it I'm gonna try out flower three I think that's pretty good eh I'm gonna go do a before and after if it just click on the image it tells me the before and after I'm gonna I mean some really nice pops on my shadows a nice vibrancy and structure I think that's pretty good I'm gonna hit okay now I like to just open up my textures and drag them over I know that a lot of people do place in bed but for a lot of reasons I'm not going to get into I just prefer to open it from bridge so I'm gonna go to the let's see where's it at hello impasto fresca collection and open up the merengue texture alright so I'm just it's up here I'm just gonna grab it drag it over to the tab I like working in tabs by the way and then drop it onto my image I'm gonna hold on the shift key so that it's centered there we go and I'm gonna go ahead and put this on to soft light usually and these kind of images where it's an environment with colors soft light and overlay are going to be your go-to starting points that's a little too heavy I'm gonna bring down the opacity to say 55 percent 4 percent and I want my texture to totally fit the image the way the texture so I'm gonna do a transform on that command T or be controlled to you on a PC and I can't see my transform bounding box because it's outside the frame so I'm gonna hit command 0 or control Z Ron on a PC and then resize my texture okay I'm gonna hit enter to accept that let's go back to fill the frame okay that's looking pretty good but I find I almost always want to tweak that texture so what I'm gonna do is do a levels on it a levels adjustment on it and I never ever apply the adjustment directly to the layer I want to work just non-destructively because I may want to go back and make some adjustments once I start adding other elements or when I look at it another day I might think oh I don't quite like that so I always work non-destructively so I'm gonna go over here and do an adjustment layer I'm gonna select levels and now I'm gonna clip it to I'm going to clip this to my texture so that it's only going to affect my texture I'm gonna use a clipping mask and there's several ways you can do this for today I'm going to go up to my properties panel let's rock always right above my layers and click this little square with the downward pointing arrow and that's going to clip that levels layer adjust meant to my texture and now anything I do in this adjustment layer is only affect my texture so I'm just gonna give it a little more contrast I'm gonna up those highlights a little bit okay and that's only affecting my texture not my image but it kind of in turn impacts the whole image and the brightness that kind of does but it's you know especially if you're doing colors it makes a difference because I'm changing the color I don't want to be changing the color of the image yeah you'll see that more when I get into the other demo where it's much more dramatic let's see no actually this is looking pretty good but a lot of times the yellows go too hot on this kind of an image because the green and my texture and the green the background it can get to be looking a little bit hot in the yellow so I'm gonna go ahead and do a hue/saturation adjustment level and clip that one as well and just for fun let's do let's do the clipping mask a different way I'm gonna hover between my layers here between these two layers and hold down the option key they'd be alt on a PC and just click that's another way to get to your clipping mask all right now I don't want to get rid of all my color I'm not gonna desaturate the whole thing I'm gonna go into my yellow Channel and we're just gonna pull those yellows back a bit and quite a bit actually let's see what the difference is if subtle on this one but that's something that what I would often need to do on this kind of an image so that's it and we're done with this image so that's a really easy way to get started with textures is using this technique of a little bit of texture with soft light on an image like a macro image nice open up a few of these and just making some comments just to kind of point out some details here I'm gonna open this one up real quick go back to command or control e to open that in Photoshop then I'm gonna go back to by the way just hit option right by the way to just see that one layer I can click that one layer to toggle on and off so that those my this is my Photoshop image with all my edits on it before 10 before textures and I just added some textures to get like I said this vignette effect on it and I just wanted to show you that really quick if I hope an option shift you'll be able see where my layer mask is so that texture is pretty much just on the edges and this one is overlay at 60% and this one is linear burn so I wanted it a little bit deeper kind of a really you're kind of doing a burning there than yet but I'm using textures to do that stunning and I want to talk a little bit about layer masks how many of you fine layer masks intimidating so no I'm always surprised how many people are using easier erase or rather than layer mask please don't use the eraser tool if you can use the eraser tool you can use her layer mask I'm going to show you how to do that and that way your your working non-destructively and you need to work non-destructive a because in textures you might add other texture and suddenly that change is what you want to do with the texture beneath and so I'm gonna just turn this off real quick and let's just throw away that layer mask real quick delete it so to add a layer mask you just go down here to the square of the circle add the layer mask and remember I said the black means it's gonna hide anything on that layer quite when you paint with white it's gonna reveal so anything that's white I'm layer mask is gonna reveal what's below it it's gonna back up here I just did that to bed backwards okay if it's black it's covering up anything on that layer so it's kind of like using the eraser you're cutting away what's there so if you use white I'm gonna use X to go back to change to X in the foreground then I'm gonna reveal so here I'm just gonna reveal the edges I'm painting on that layer mask and a hundred percent with white to reveal those edges and if I go too far I go far too in here I'm gonna go X again and that brings me back to black and black is taking away black it's acting like the eraser okay I'm gonna drag because I'm basically doing the same mask I'm gonna select the mask hold down option then be alt on the PC and just drag it up there and that copies my layer mask okay so those are there are some nice basic layer mask techniques I'm gonna close this out now and bring up some other things I'm not gonna save it because it's already the way I want it okay what do I want to open up next when I say a lot of people have asked me well how do you cut out your you know background and it's not understanding how textures work completely because with textures you're not doing you're usually not doing a full cut out whoops hold on there do that okay here we go I turned everything back on if I open if I show you my layer mask I'm gonna hold down option and click in this layer mask you can see that it's not a cut out there's a lot of a mass but it's not solid and there's Ares up and here they're masked and there's kind of a grungy effect where so a lot of that textures on top of the quince and even this one is a different texture is not totally masked I kind of pulled out some of the texture in the highlights nice I have all my edits here in Photoshop I'm gonna group my textures so I can turn them off unless I just selected all the way I just selected the first one shift clicked it and sucked it all in them and group it but don't Comanche controlled unit on the UM on the PC and I do that a lot I group my textures should just kind of make things tidy and then I can easily turn them off to see what's going on so what I wanted to show you and I turn this off is I put this texture on and multiply at 87% and it does have quite a bit of layer masking but it's not a hundred percent I didn't come up with you know everything in the in the thing that's like this books and the ball and the thing I'm not even card up but this texture is kind of lightened middle so it's blending in nicely I'm getting mostly detail on the edges which is really Newark in Nice it to kind of frame the image and get more of that vintage feel to this image but I want to kick it up a notch so this is Leslie secret sauce probably everyone does us I don't know but I came up with myself I'm Kate those and I've already duplicated by selected both um oh I'm not going into this and now but I did do an adjustment on that were I really up the contrast on that texture can make such a difference yeah so back to what it was I want to kind of kick it up a notch and I'm duplicated my main textures above and now I'm gonna put it on normal blend mode and I'm gonna mostly fill actually I would have actually let's look at that layer mask I filled it completely with black and then I've gone in with a white brush and brought back the normal no no and on this I've got the normal blend at fifty two percent so I'm just really giving it a little more of that vintage glass frame mmm effect it makes it a little more opaque I just wanted to show you that I use that technique a lot especially with these textures that have a lot of grunge on the edge and I want to get more of that grunge effect I'll first do and multiply to kind of blend it into my texture excuse me into my image and they'll duplicate it fill the layer mask with black and what that that's basically black conceals the layer and then I paint back in with white which reveals part of it I'm gonna demo this let's look at a full screen for a second so here I'm really pushing that boundary between photograph and illustration okay and this was my raw file how cool is that final basis a long way away right it's on here my backslash key and just show you mine before it's basically you know the exposures okay but it's really lacking contrast um it's pretty blah so I just went in and gave it a little exposure I brought up the highlights we're still fine we're not doing any clipping I brought up the shadows a little bit and I did a little bit of a curve I did a little bit of clarity but 224 and oh I also did do a little bit of an adjustment brush and some of this shadow area to just kind of bring that up a little bit and I'm not gonna go ahead detail on that too cuz day because it's not we're not doing an image processing tutorial day I'm gonna go ahead and go into photoshop so command E or ctrl e to bring and you bring it into Photoshop let's fill the frame now here I would do any of my edits again and I'm gonna do man one to bring that all the way to 100% and I decided I didn't want like this cafe on there so I'm gonna select it with my lasso to him by the way I hit L to get that lasso tool and this is a again another thing for the the blinking out here hmm delete to content-aware I'm gonna fill this in I didn't do this really did I I'm not gonna do all of that right now I do want to show you where the table was meeting the background and I'm gonna do a quick swipe with the spot cloning what does it get a Spot Healing Brush rather I'm just gonna swipe it real quick to kind of soften that so I don't want that showing you go back to zero fill flaming now I'm gonna take a brush it's pretty soft 50% I'm gonna slick down here and I'm just gonna blend that a little bit more all right duplicate that layer commander control j filter topaz studio clarity I do use other presets but I know that for this one I'd like this I'm gonna go to the flower presets and do flower three let's fit this I can see what's going on um here's my before and after I'm gonna click on it before after I'm getting some nice my saturation and pops I'm gonna make a little bit of adjustment here though we don't have to accept what clarity thinks we want it's bringing my highlights down and I want my highlights to be actually quite high I'm gonna bring it up to about nine you need a little bit more I'm still not getting any clipping my mid-tones maybe a little bit more I was thinking about this I ended up for that choosing a texture from the autumn rain collection this rainy day texture and it was a square one that I chose I'm gonna double click that bring it in hold on a shift key on a drag second Sentret and I know I'm gonna want multiply I made this image a few years ago so I'm kind of having to remember what I did but I know I went and multiplied bring it down to maybe um let's see I made some notes about this I think was about 55% okay this was our original but both the original open and where we're going and this is where we're gonna go so at some point I'm gonna turn this off for now at some point I decided I'm gonna make my image Square and the way I did that was expanding the canvas so I'm gonna do command option C that would be I guess control alt see on PC and I just made the square I put in more pixels in me to square and made sure that there was the dialogue what a box would have come out to be white okay and I duplicated my file up to the next level filled the background layer with white you guys with me so far what I do yep wonderful now I'm gonna need to get rid of you know all of this shadowed area otherwise it's gonna show through my texture and I want that so what I did was I put a layer mask layer mask it'll come in its black again I didn't know that mm-hm oh wait a minute actually I don't want that I do want whites a command I control I did bring it back to white select my brush I've got my big soft brush still the foreground still it black if it wasn't I'd hit D so I'm gonna go because big soft brush at 100% on my layer mask we're in black and just get rid of this being careful not to get into those flowers with a part of the image I'm gonna bring it down a bit so I can get into here and I don't want to risk covering up my image with the white below so I'm gonna check my layer mask real quick Simon it's gonna do option click on that and make sure this is a great way to check your layer mask it's not really a problem anyway but it's good to check so what I did is I went ahead and did an adjustment layer and I've already done this and I brought the highlights way up it was filled with black and I painted back to if I turn that off what was waiting that's what you know I really blew it out and filled it with black and then I came in with my brush and then brushed in with white this time just hit X so I could get that's a little bit too much I'm gonna go up to maybe 50% opacity and just get a little bit more of that shadow and I'm not gonna be I don't to worry about covering up my image I didn't totally cut up the shadow so I know we're good to go here let's go back I've already placed the texture the way it was before and I decided so what we're kind of back to her before I place the texture it's on a multiply pin blend mode at 55% opacity and looking at this I decided okay well it makes more sense to have the blue be kind of sky so I'm gonna rotate my texture so command T I'd be controlled to you on the PC and I'm just gonna drag around holding down shift so that it snaps to 90 percent 90 degrees so now the blue is up there so here's where I would start I put a layer mask and I'd start get a brush and start doing you know I start using let's go back to get our foreground in black I'm gonna do X to get my foreground back to ya foreground back to black to kill it pause here and then I'm gonna use a lower pass it and just start painting away now I'm gonna cheat because we don't have time for me to go in and do all the layered that I would have done to get to the original I'm gonna copy my old air mask by hitting option I'm gonna I've placed me up my entire layer mask I option click in the layer mask I'm going to command a to select control a on PC command or ctrl C to copy it and I'm gonna open up my layer mask here again and paste that in so that we've cheated again Leslie I didn't know you could do that I wanna get a little more pop that texture so I'm gonna again go over here do a layers adjustment level adjustment clip that to my texture and I'm gonna bring the contrast up let's drag this to about right there and drag my blacks in alright so we're given that texture a little more pop getting licensed it's a nice detail and some nice contrast there so let's see let me take a breath here ok so I'm liking that but I decided you know I'm not wild about the colors over here though so now I'm gonna add a hue/saturation adjustment level and clip that as well now I probably played around a lot but I already know where I'm going today so let's go to clip on the right thing here I'm going to dial in 47 and saturation 22 so I'm gonna use my layer mask and a big fluffy black brush I'm using my bracket key to get make that bigger I'm gonna do 100% because I want that blue and I'm gonna paint back that blue just in that area and maybe it's a little bit too abrupt so I'm gonna go back to my white do X and maybe a lower opacity and by the way I'm changing my past days when the keyboard so just for for 40% whenever you can use those shortcuts saves you having to go up here it's faster and learning our shortcuts I really got good at learning a few time so I did another wrong one whoops hitting the wrong things here I did another hue/saturation and clipped that one as well and played around some more I already know that I went to 57 and this was just you know playing around but oh I've lost my blue blue now so I'm gonna drag this layer mask up to the other one option or alt drag it up and there's my blue again let's see how we're doing with our original this was my original that got moved over a little bit but besides that it's fine oh yeah my texture was you know what I'm not gonna change it because it would involved a lot of mm-hmm but I want to add some it's a little bit more into a whimsical effect so I'm gonna open up a vintage vent French script overlay let's go back to bridge rather and come down here to the essential vintage French overlay bundle and I'm gonna open up the script folder and I already know that I want the number 11 because it's kind of a nice skinny shape that would fit nicely here and it's gonna drag it in there plop it down actually I've dragged you to the wrong place I'm gonna put it up there and it's trying to clip unclip it now when I drag in overlays I usually make it into a smart object it's kind of overlooked because I might change my mind about you know what I want to do this maybe I want to make it smaller or bigger you know I might decide to make it small and then they oh no I want it big again so I do usually make those into smart objects and the way I'm going to do that is just if you make any changes to this object you can get back to your original thing and it's not going to it's not just active you know if I were just gonna do this without a smart object let's see I mean it's smaller I made it bigger again I made a smaller again I made it bigger again each time you do that you lose quality but when you do a smart object it remembers to go back to the original I guess I don't know yeah by the way I could also get to that smart object by just going to this would you command T or ctrl T and just resize it a little bit maybe now obviously we don't want it in black so we have to change the color and I like to always reckon on destructively I'm gonna go over here to my layer adjustment and pick a solid color and start out you can do anything really I'm gonna guess I'm gonna go over to my swatches because you can grab colors from your swatches as well pick that pink color and click OK and now I need to flip that below so I'm gonna hover between these two layers with the option key and click it and that click that clipped it to that layer so now that color is only gonna affect the anything that has pixels in the layer below and I'm gonna select a blend mode I could have gone with multiply but I wanted a more subtle effect so I ended up going down to hard hard light I think I suggest ya hard light 67% is what I had chosen s to it's not really showing up very well in this so I'm gonna make some adjustments ok there we go so just showing a little bit it's just kind of giving me a little hint I'm gonna move this to the side a little bit to get in and I'm gonna also put a layer mask on here let's zoom in a little bit do command one brings me to a hundred percent I don't really want these flowers to have script on them so I'm gonna select my brush again I'm gonna do X on the keyboard again to get that black switch back to my black I'm gonna make my brush smaller with the left bracket key I'm gonna go to 100% I'm getting on my keyboard and he's doing 100 on the keyboard and we're gonna take away some of that and that's good enough it doesn't have to be perfect I'm gonna zoom back out doing you command zero controls you on the PC and sometimes I'll use even a brunch get up a brunch brush and kind of like break up that text if it's really strong in this case I kinda just wanna duck I'm just gonna swipe a few places to kind of just break up so you're not recognizing words okay we're done with the we're done with the UM overlay now so I want to be do a little bit more of a whimsical thing by going and grabbing that butterfly and I'm going to the bees and butterflies collection and opening that up and I'm gonna select this little butterfly down here blended layers which I won't go into a lot right now but I wanted to grab both of those like I hit held down shift to grab both of them and I'm gonna drag it into my layer over here hit that tab in your side and just already so let's see how we did look at that we're there and I think I actually did at the very end put another levels adjustment for the whole thing just because functions yeah more kick I mean that sometimes you have to make adjustments what you've got got everything together but we're pretty close to the original amazing that's so impressive thank you so much okay I'm gonna stop stirring now amazing thank you everyone we would love to have you back as well love to come back to guys it's my first life and I was so nervous today [Music]

Channel: Design Cuts

Views: 3,194

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, photoshop cc 2018, graphic design tutorial, design tutorial photoshop, graphic design, adobe photoshop tutorial, tutorial photoshop, tutorial for beginners, learn graphic design, tutorial, how to, photoshop tutorial for beginners, photoshop basics tutorial, photoshop cc beginner, blend textures photoshop, clipping masks, clipping mask photoshop cc, blending modes in photoshop, applying textures in photoshop, textures overlays, lightroom editing

Id: Bj6crp7pZ1o

Length: 42min 11sec (2531 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020