How To Master Applying Textures To Your Photography

hey everyone I'm Lesley Nicol french-kiss collections thank you for joining me today I'm gonna be giving you some power tips for using textures with your photography and as always I'd like to give you a lot of information in a short amount of time so things gonna move pretty quickly don't worry about trying to take notes your first time viewing you can always watch it again take notes in if you're new to texture this could be a little bit advanced but don't worry about it you know I'll just give you an idea of what's possible all right without further ado let's get started so today I want to give you five power tips for using textures with your photographs and because I want to use three images for that and due to time constraints I won't be able to do a step-by-step on each image so it's gonna be more about certain techniques than a step-by-step approach okay so for our first image I'm going to apply it texture to the seniya photograph that I shot in the studio we're gonna go from this to this and just as an FYI this was my raw photograph in Lightroom so this starting point is already been cropped retouched contrast and filter applied all right I already have this open in Photoshop so I'm going to switch we switch over to here and you can see my adjustments to that image here and I'm going to open up a texture I've chosen the torrent texture from the autumn rain collection so I'm gonna open that from Brij I like dragging my images from tabs so I'm gonna drag that in place it and I don't I'm gonna resize that a bit so command T or ctrl Z T and PC command or control 0 which would give me my entire bounding box I can see what I'm doing and let's see let's do this actually let's go ahead and change that blend mode to multiply so I can see what we're doing here okay let's move that over here and maybe not quite that much all right well let's zoom in here a little bit I kind of like what the texture the feeling of the watercolor kind of brings the same infant nice energy to the image but I'm not really liking the color so that brings us to our first tip we're gonna use adjustment layers to change the color and contrast of this texture okay so tip number one year's adjustment layer to change the color contrast and saturation of textures so what our adjustment layers adjustment layers are ways of changing your image in a non-destructive way using layers so on the layer panel I'm gonna go down here to the buttons at the bottom select the circle that's half white half black hold that down with my mouse or in this case my welcome pin and you have a number of options here I'm gonna choose the hue/saturation now I only want this hue/saturation change to be on my texture and not on my flower image so I mean whose a clipping mask to restrain that edit to the texture so there are a number of ways to apply a clipping mask let's just go up here to the properties pan which I have open above the layers panel and at the bottom of the properties panel there's a square of the downward pointing arrow I'm just gonna click that and now you probably can't see this in the video but there's on that hue/saturation layer there's now a downward pointing arrow which means that that is now clipped to the texture so any edits I do let's do something wild that's not actually affecting the flower that much anyway okay so I know from playing around that I want to adjust the hue to minus 33 and the saturation to +5 I know that's looking pretty garish right now but hang in there with me alright I'm also going to change the brightness and contrast I'm going to apply another adjustment layer let's do levels and you can just stack these adjustment layers as many as you want and clip them just keep clipping this so this time must change things up a little bit to apply a clipping mask I'm going to do command option G and that was with the levels layer selected on PC that would be ctrl alt G all right and again I know from playing around that I want to bring my shadows in to maybe let's see 28 and I'm gonna brighten my mid-tones to about 110 okay that's looking pretty garish let's lower the opacity on that texture layer to 75 okay that's already looking better alright at this point I'm going to apply a layer mask to get some of that texture off of the flower now on texturing photographs the goal is not to completely cut out the image and stick it on the texture you're blending the texture with the image so you want to apply a layer mask and just kind of lightly brush out and clean up the texture on the image a little bit I'm gonna hit B on my keyboard to select the brush and I have the paintbrush selected here and I already know I have a soft a really soft round brush selected the way did that by the way is I control clicked on my image and it brought up my brush options that would have been right clicking on the PC okay and a command click brings me back there to get my brush larger my right bracket key I'm gonna hit fight on the keyboard to do 50% opacity of my brush and then just start brushing over there left bracket key to make that brush smaller maybe do 3 for 30% opacity to come down here now rather than have you watch me edit this entire layer mask I'm just gonna steal a layer mask from an image that I already have open that I've done the layer mask for so I'm gonna hit option and hit that layer mask on PC that would be Alt + that shows me my layer mask I'm gonna do command a to select everything ctrl a on the PC and then command C or control C on a PC come back over here option click again and paste in that layer mask again that would be Alt on a PC option click again and there's my layer mask all done by the way I forgot to mention on that layer mask when you are using the brush you want to make sure that your foreground background are set to black and white you use black to eliminate texture and white if you wanted to bring something back let's say that I I'm using black and let's say I just accidentally brushed away too much let's do it with a higher opacity you can see what I'm doing I'm going to do seven on my keyword board for 70% let's say I'd brushed off too much here I could do command Z but let's just say I'd did a little bit there I didn't notice it in time and I needed to fix that I'd hit X on my keyboard to bring the white forward for ground and now I could brush with white to bring texture back all right so that's looking pretty good but there's one thing that's bothering me here let's zoom in a little bit I'm not loving this paper texture on the watercolor for this image sometimes the paper texture can be a nice touch to an image but not so much on this kind of light breezy image so that brings us to tip number two blur the texture let's go over to our keynote thing tip number two blur the texture all right now for those of you who are powerful shop users I'll often do a smart object to do a filter but in this case I'm not going to I'm just going to do go ahead and apply a blur filter let's just do our good old Gaussian blur and it will depend how much you blur will depend on the size of your image and your texture I had this was already set to about 13 which what I had before so I knew that about hello 13 blur on this so there we go that's tip number two blur the texture okay our next image is this still life that I set up in my courtyard when my mock orange was in bloom taking my lens baby and this was the original photograph and I said I'd photograph us with Lensbaby so it has this blurred effect and the blur and the the tablecloth kind of draped off to the side right feels like there's a lot of movement in here I liked the the possibility of the of an airy feeling but I wasn't really getting it from my original photographing and I did play around with this and light bid this is almost read out of the camera but I did lift the shadows a bit in the mid-tones a little bit of DA's and Lightroom but it's it's not far from straight out straight out of the camera all right so I like I said I like I want to make this image go more towards kind of a breezy feeling maybe almost impressionistic so I'm gonna open up a texture from the spring and pasto collection this texture is called awakening and let's see him drag it over drop it on I know I'm gonna resize this I'm not gonna worry about it being centered so command or ctrl T command or control zero to see my bounding box and I'm just going to I'm not gonna make this fit but I'm just gonna make it a little smaller I think something like that okay hit enter and now I'm going to put it on the blend mode soft light and yeah it's looking a little too saturated now I think I'm gonna take out some of that green saturation so as we talked about an irritant in the early demonstration I'm going to apply a adjustment layer we're gonna do the hue/saturation adjustment layer I'm gonna do the clipping mask on that I just did that from the properties panel and in this case I'm gonna take out the greens so I'm gonna choose a green Channel and I'm gonna take it down to maybe minus 42 that's it's a subtle change but you just kicked those greens back a little bit okay so I wanted to get more texture effect but I definitely don't want to put more saturation your color in it so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate my texture command commander control J and I'm gonna bring it up above that clipping mask I lost my clipping mask them and put it back on there and now I'm going to do another adjustment layer and this I'm gonna i'm going to choose black and white and i'm gonna clip that on there holding down the option or Alt key I'm just gonna hover between the layers and click come on there we go and that's also on soft light and I think I want to take off some of the texture on these nectarines so I'm going back to the color version texture and I put a layer mask select a brush and I know I still have this kind of big soft brush on there my foreground set to black I'm gonna choose maybe 30% so I'm hitting three on the keyboard and I'm gonna brush that back let's do 50 okay so if that demonstrated tip number three which is duplicate the layer and change the saturation and or blend mode and that was when we duplicated that layer and applied the black and white adjustment layer and I've also sometimes duplicated a texture and change the blend mode to normal and use a layer mask I've demonstrated this in some of my other webinars and then you could get a stronger effect like maybe on the edges so sometimes trying to duplicate your texture trying to different blend mode or maybe even just using layer mask to make some parts of it stronger now when you convert a texture to black and white you will usually find that you need to change the contrast and you played that contrast so I'm going to add another adjustment layer let's see Ione with the levels and I'm going to clip that again I'm just gonna hold on option and hover between and click and I'm going to increase the contrast on this right Deeping the shout the shadows and bring up the bringing the highlights of more you know pretty much almost always have to play with that contrast on black and white textures all right now I'm feeling like I'm gonna zoom out here a little bit I really want to emphasize this blur going off here I want to make that brighter and I want to have more of a matte feeling so I'm gonna go back to my the layer of my image layer here didn't we do that add layer above select my brush with white as my foreground make it a great big fluffy brush and I'm gonna paint it with white let's start at maybe 20% that's maybe too much I'm gonna back off here just do 10% maybe a little bit more here as well maybe a little bit down here well now our Emmett is looking a little bit blah and kind of washed out so this brings us to our fourth tip which is edit the image as needed to work with the texture all right I'm gonna select my image my still-life layer the background layer I'm going to add an adjustment layer a levels layer I'm gonna increase the contrast on this I'm going to deepen the shadows a bit and bring up my highlights just a little bit whoa that's looking too saturated now isn't it so now I am going to add a hue/saturation adjustment layer and I'm going to decrease the saturation except that you know I kind of like the saturation on the right side that left sides looking better looking more balanced and what the right sights looking a little bit dull I'm kind of losing the nice gold and this in the teapot actually they've got a coffee set so I'm gonna select a layer mask on the hue/saturation layer it's like my brush make sure that black I selected in my foreground which it is and I'm gonna paint that back more let's try maybe 70% so I'm sucking 7 on the keyboard and I'm gonna paint that back I want this right-hand edge to have a little more pop let's do hundred percent zero okay okay so I'm looking at this and I'm feeling like I want a little more pop a little more structure in this image so I'm going back to that background layer my still life layer and I'm going to duplicate that commander control J and I'm going to apply a topaz Labs studio clarity filter and I want to come down here to the I've already done this of course so I know what I want to try let's see where are you okay I'm with the micro contrast boost to it okay all right well that gave me a lot more structure but I'm not liking having too much detail up here in the mock orange tree area the top left so I'm gonna put a layer mask select my big brush with black as my foreground and I'm going to mask out the top left side at a hundred percent okay from my final little edit I feel like the coffeepot set it's looking a little dark to me now so I'm gonna do a little bit of dodging on that and the best way to dodge is to do you burn dodge they're not using the not using Photoshop spurn dodge tools so I'm gonna add a layer above my image we're gonna fill it with 50% gray by doing shift delete I guess on PC that'd be shift backspace I'm not quite sure about that and I'm gonna select foreground color excuse me it's like 50% gray rather at a hundred percent and then I'm going to set the blend mode to overlay now because overlay is a contrast blend mode it doesn't even see 50% gray the only reason I'm putting 50% gray is it it helps me to see in my layers what's happening he helps me to see my edits better you don't actually need to have that 50% gray in there all right with white is my foreground I've got my brush selected already I'm going to make that brush smaller by the hitting the left bracket tool and a pretty little pass it'll start with 10% I just want to bring it back a little bit just get a little bit of a pop there brush a little smaller still just want a little bit of pop on that coffee coffee thing and that's it let's compare it to my original edit it's pretty close and the main thing I really want to emphasize from this demonstration is that you want to push and pull your texture in your image and tweak until you get it exactly the way you want you know I think of it that way is pushing and pulling that image pushing and pulling that texture to get it tweak to exactly the look that you want okay so finally I want to add that during demonstration I've retraced my steps and carefully we created this for you but what I'm actually creating it's not a linear process you know I'm trying this I'm trying that I'm deleting layers I'm trying different textures you know I don't remember offhand you know how I decided to duplicate that and change it to black and white but at some point I did so just remember that in the demonstration it may look like I knew exactly what I was doing from the start but what I'm actually creating I don't I'm trying this I'm trying that some things work some things don't and I keep playing so for our third demonstration I chose this very simple image it's just this tree branch hanging over a pond and this is this is my original photograph with no edits let me zoom in here a little bit and then this is with Photoshop edits and then textured let's open up the Photoshop image that has been edited okay so I basically I applied the Topaz labs clarity dramatic contrast and color filter to this image I did a little bit of retouching this was the original up here on the right hand corner top there's a highlight a spectral highlight up there that's a little too bright I took that out and a little bit of a branch that was bothering me there and I took out and then I applied a burn dodged layer and just burned in the center branch just a little tiny bit okay now this is already a very colorful and it's a pretty simple image so I want to I want to put a little bit of interest in there but I don't want to overwhelm this image either so I'm going to use a texture that's been converted to black and white I know we talked about this a bit in the last demonstration but I wanted to show this one too to show a black and white texture used on its own so I'm going to use that same texture used before the spring and pasto awakening but this time I'm gonna choose the black and white version that's provided in that collection that collection has the black and white versions included so I'm going to open that up drag it into my document oops I didn't hang down hold on shift I use your hold down shift when I put it on there so that it's centered I'm gonna resize this to fit my texture to command zero so I can see my bounding box B control 0 on PC my texture down hold on shift now so I can override the constrain size on that hit enter now usually when I use the texture on in black and white I choose overlay or soft light and I'm gonna choose soft light I think over days a little over easily too intense I think so i'm gonna choose soft light actually let's try overlay and just reduce the opacity and see if i like that better me zoom out a little bit no I think I like soft light it's a little just a little more subtle so that's a really nice way to get this lovely painterly texture without any color from the texture let's zoom in here some more so you're just getting this great painterly texture without adding in the actual color to the image and that's it for this image and that brings us to our fifth tip which is convert the texture to black and white or desaturate you could also use a hue/saturation adjustment layer and desaturate a texture and that that can work too thanks for watching today and I hope you found those tips useful you can find the textures that I used in the links below and I will see you next time

Channel: Design Cuts

Views: 1,142

Keywords: Graphic design, Graphic designer, Graphic designers at work, tom ross, graphic design interview, freelance graphic artist, creative process, creative brains, design tutorial, graphic design tutorial, photoshop, photoshop tutorial 2020, photoshop for beginners, photoshop tips and tricks 2020, photoshop tips for beginners, photoshop tips, photoshop tips and tricks, leslie nicole, french kiss collection textures, textures in photoshop, using textures in photoshop, texture tips

Id: nb1husdLlaA

Length: 29min 0sec (1740 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020