The Art of Texture Blending

hello and welcome to the art of texture blending my name is Jason O'Dell I'm a photographer in Colorado Springs Colorado and you can find me online at luminescent photo com let's start off with the overview for today of our topics I'm going to just introduce the topic of texture blending and I will go through what we need to use in terms of like our materials and then I will go into the process of texture blending giving the the fundamental technique in the approach to it and then a little bit into some advanced ideas and techniques that you can use and then I will close with where you can go to find textures to use with your photography so let's start off by just looking at texture blending as a technique and define what it is and how it works and why I like it so much and why I hope you will like it too texture blending is when we create a composite of two or more images and it usually involves a photograph overlaid with some kind of secondary image that a texture could be canvas it could be a painting it could be rocks or stone or pretty much anything but we're going to be doing a composite and working with our images in layers and the practical uses for textures are many but for the most part what I like is just from an artistic standpoint you get to really explore creating some unique painterly looks for your photographs like this one that I have up here of a wild flower and it kind of looks pretty cool to me that it's something different what gives your photograph a more artistic look and feel but you can also use textures is a practical tool on working with tech images that might be a little more challenging so one problem that you can cover up with the texture is sometimes you might have a distracting background maybe there's a lot of something in the background or unpleasant objects that you want to get rid of and you don't want to clone them out so you can use a texture to cover those up and create a different image and what a real important thing for texture blending is that it allows you to use your images that that you've captured maybe at a time of day or on a condition that wasn't so great for what you thought so maybe you're at a place and the only time you can visit is midday light and you've got just you know it's the middle of the day and it's just a blank sky and there's no clouds what are you going to do or if it's like gloomy and overcast and the skies are gray or maybe it's foggy you can use texture overlays to really work with those images and and do something with photographs that might otherwise have been just kind of I won't say throw away shots but certainly not as powerful so here's some example this is a ladybug that I photographed here in Colorado Springs a couple of years ago just a macro shot and one of the things I like about macro shots is that close-ups is that you get these nice clean backgrounds so when you're looking for images a nice clean background is a great place to start they're going to be the easiest images for you to work with and you overlay a texture and you can get something like this so I used this texture to not only create the painterly look but also to cover up some of the elements that were that were distracting in this image I was up in the mountains in Colorado came across this wild place where there's all kinds of stuff and you never know what you're going to come across and I like these skulls these are horse skulls but I kind of wanted to work with this and make it a little bit more abstract so I added a texture overlay and you can really see on this one how it almost looks like it's part of the canvas painting itself and so that's what the texture is able to do for me here a lot of times when you're traveling this is the case where you might not run into you might run into conditions that aren't aren't Papa perfect so I was doing a photo walk in New York City a couple of years ago and we're walking around in midtown Manhattan and unfortunately got really kind of gloomy and it was October so you never know what the weather's going to do and I love this shot of the Empire State Building reflected in another in the windows of another building but it just you know the the color the light it was just kind of a gloomy day so I added one of my custom textures to it and it created this totally different look for this photograph same thing in Chicago now I didn't have an overcast day this is the marina towers in Chicago and we were walking around taking taking pictures like you might do if you were a tourist somewhere bright middle of the day Sun is up and what are you going to do so I was standing between these buildings and I used a fisheye lens to capture this and you can see how the Sun is in the in the shot so I wanted to make it kind of wild so I added a texture and I got this image creates a unique total totally abstract and wild look to this photograph here's a shot I captured in Denver and in this image I was able to I was originally capturing HDR it wasn't the best evening out there for for a sky so this was this was an overexposed shot it was from a bracketed sequence and the white blown out sky works perfectly I overlaid the texture and this is what I got another travel photo last October I was in Dublin I was in Ireland and this isn't a church in Dublin if you go to Ireland or a lot of the places in the in Europe a lot of times you get kind of gloomy and overcast skies it's not always picture-perfect so what do you do I'm not going to be back there again I like I wanted to take a picture I wanted to make it unique well I added a texture and I got this look on it so those are things you can do with you know that's the concept of textures and I really find that having them in your arsenal and knowing that you can do it is and work with the technique is a really good just piece of knowledge to have it's like I call it part of your your digital camera bag it's knowing what you can do with your shots after the fact so instead of passing up photographs that you might not want to take because they're you know not ideal conditions for your subject you can work with them in other creative and artistic ways so I want to move on into discussing sort of our toolkit here what do we need in order to use texture blending and and make it work we're going to need a couple of things the first thing you need is kind of obvious when you need your photograph and like I said your original image is going to be anything you want it to be but it's going to work really well if you've got shots that have out-of-focus bouquet or you know maybe it's a telephoto shot macro shots or clean boring skies even blown out skies and overcast then you need a second image to overlay as your texture and that can be anything again and I'll talk more about those at the end and here's the key you need to have a layer compositing editor that supports layers and blending modes and hopefully masking now for a lot of people this is going to be it can be just about anything but if you've already got Lightroom if you're using Lightroom which I do and I have the and you have the subscription Lightroom Creative Cloud Edition then you've got Photoshop already installed on your computer all you have to do is make sure it's run you're paying for it anyway and Photoshop is what I use it's the gold standard by doing this but you can also with some limitations you can work this in elements and I don't use elements so I'm not going to be able to answer your direct questions about it but I know you can do layers in elements at least you used to be able to once upon a time but even the free program like is going to allow you to do layer blending and masking that's all you need to do this and if you're on the Mac there's a there's a relatively inexpensive program called Pixelmator this will it'll do that too but what you're looking for is a pixel editor like Photoshop that supports layers and layer blending modes and hopefully layer masking if you've got all that then you're going to have the most power at your disposal to work with with textures there are some other programs that allow you to do some texture blending one example is something that just came out from Mac fun software they have a program called luminar and then it has layers and you can you can add texture layers but it's a little bit less powerful than what you would get with Photoshop but you can still do it and there's certain programs for black and white that might have built-in textures and let you do that too I like to be able to blend in my own files so start by choosing a base image that for the best results are going to have a clean or out of focus background that could be a close-up or macro shot like that ladybug photograph that I had or images with a blank sky or an overcast sky foggy images so I'm going to pull up some images here real quick in my browser give you an idea of what I'm talking about these these images are ideal for texture blending so here I've got a close-up this was actually taken with a telephoto lens from far back where you can see I've got a nice clean background on this image clean blank wall this is an interior from a Victorian building nearby where I live in Colorado this is the Paris hotel in Las Vegas a really cloudy day so it works again perfectly for for the kinds of shots that you might overlay a texture on here's a shot from in front of the Supreme Court building in DC this was again a HDR bracket so when you bracket for HDR a lot of times you'll get those overexposed shots for the for the shadows and it kind of blows out the sky so you could use this one as well and then a snowy foggy snowy day at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs gave me this shot and as well as this one so when you have these shot with the blank nothing skies these would be something that you might convert to black and white normally they're going to work really nicely for for texture blending so what do you do this is where I'm going to walk you through the steps the the basics of how to do it and then from there we'll explore some of the the techniques so what you'd need to do first is open your original image in whatever your layer compositing application is that's for me is Photoshop but it could be elements it could be one of those other programs just going to open that image step two and and this is very important you want to bring your texture image file into that same document so you can't just use the open command in Photoshop you need to to add the image and place this image as a layer inside of Photoshop I want to show you that so let me go back I've already got Photoshop open okay and here's that that butterfly image and what I like to do with Photoshop is I like to just go ahead and have my browser and this is my file browser this is a photo mechanic but you could use bridge you could just even use a window if you wanted to and there's a neat little trick in Photoshop that allows you to open two images in the same document and that trick is just drag-and-drop from your browser onto the Photoshop document that you've already got open so let's do that I'm going to just go ahead and and grab a a texture image and grab it in my browser click and drag it on to the photo shop window and when you do that you get this little X and you'll have this this pattern you'll see that there's a layer produced here I'm looking down in the layers panel and I've got these little squares around it the resize handles if you will so before I go anywhere I've got to set this and what I'm going to do is I can rotate the image I can stretch the image to resize and fit it so I'm just let's go ahead and do that on this one I'm going to rotate here and then I'm going to move it with my mouse and just drag back corners to get it to cover up the image and then just hit Enter or return on your keyboard and and now you have the texture in a separate layer and now you can see our problem that we have and and this is where your skill is going to come in I've got two layers I've got my original image layer in the background and I've got the texture layer on top of it so it's covering it up so let's go back to our steps and let's talk about the now most critical step once you get the two images in the same Photoshop document you need to reveal your photograph and the way you reveal the photograph is entirely up to you so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to talk about the fundamental ways of doing that and that's going to be an exercise in Photoshop layers we're going to adjust layer opacity layer masking and layer blending modes so how do you blend your textures well let's start with the big three techniques we've got layer opacity layer masks and layer blending modes layer opacity simply makes the pixels in your layer transparent and it allows the lower layer to show through so let me show you how you can do that I'm going to go back to photoshop and I'm going to to make sure that my texture layer is selected and highlighted in the layers panel so if you the most important thing in Photoshop for this work is you need to have the layers panel visible so if it's not visible you'll want to make sure you go over to window and choose layers so that is visible that's critical here and in the layers panel I'll make this a little bigger here so we can see it there is a couple of little pulldown menus and the one we're going to start with is this one labeled opacity that sets the big opacity of the pixels in the selected layer so what I can do is just drop it down and as I lower the opacity it starts to disappear if I take it to zero it's gone completely away in the simplest sense that is a texture blend if you did nothing else here you would have this image and then you could continue to adjust it and work on it if you wanted to so that's layer opacity and it's a very easy adjustment to make but there's other ways we can go through this as well the what if you don't want to have the entire layer opaque and just the opacity on the entire layer what if you just wanted to make certain areas darker or lighter than others and allow your image to show through for that we're going to use the technique called layer masking and this is a critical technique for anyone who wants to play around with Photoshop it's one that I highly highly recommend that you learn layer masking is super powerful because it allows you to either show or hide the pixels in your texture layer or any layer for a composite without permanently erasing those pixels themselves ok so layer masks are a non destructible and non-destructive and reversible tool that you can use so to do it we're going to add a layer mask to the layer and then we're going to use the brush tool and the brush tool with just black or white pixels is going to enable us to to show or hide areas of the texture layer itself let's do that I'm going to go into Photoshop and let I'm going to put the opacity back at 100% on this layer and I'm going to select the layer so I want you to pay attention I've got the layer selected it's got the little white brackets around its thumbnail and then I'm go to the bottom right corner of my screen and in the bottom right corner of the layers panel down here at the bottom there are these little icons and this this little icon here at the bottom with the rectangle with the hole in it is add layer mask I'm going to click that when you click it you get this second thumbnail up here and it's solid white okay real quick sidenote on layer masking white pixels reveal their corresponding area in the layer itself black pixels are going to hide those pixels in the corresponding layer and anything that's gray or shades of gray is going to be at reduced opacity so this is kind of fun the trick to using a layer mask is twofold first you need to make sure that the mask is what you've selected you don't want to be painting or erasing anything on your pixel layer itself so make sure that you've clicked on the mask thumbnail or brackets around it and then you're going to choose the brush tool which is over here on the Left B the brush tool B and take a look at the foreground and background colors those are right over here on the left the top color is is the one that you'll be painting with the bottom color is one that you can just toggle to by clicking the X key on the keyboard so since our our mask is solid white it's showing everything what we're going to do is we're going to use black to reveal underneath so we're going to hide pixels in our textured here so I'm going to switch to black as my foreground color and you can do that by clicking this little double arrow here or you can just click X on your keyboard if you're in Photoshop that's the shortcut I'm going to set the brush hardness to zero so up here at the top I clicked on the brush icon and just set this hardness slider to zero so it's a real soft edge and then set your opacity to something low so like 10 or 20 percent once I do that again just double check to make sure you got your little brackets around your your thumbnail your layer mask when I paint in here I start to reveal pixels and if I just continue to paintbrush strokes it builds up stronger and stronger and what you can see is what I'm doing over here on my thumbnail now I've got some black blobs in there if I hit option and click on that you can see what my mask looks like but here's the cool thing about layer masks I can switch back to white by clicking X make this brush a little smaller and paint back in oops I'm screwing up so if you screw up go back to your history I'm going to screwing up myself so make sure you clicked on your layer thumbnail and now when I paint back in with white you'll see that the layer mask comes back to being white and my texture reappears and you can just do this and you can do that to kind of blend things in and add depth it's not hard at all and all you've got to do is toggle back and forth between black and white on your brush color make sure you're painting in the air masks and you've got it without touching any of the pixels in the layer itself so you haven't just you haven't touched anything here and and that's a super convenient and very powerful tool just in general the third and final way of blending things together is to use a feature in Photoshop called layer blending modes now what this is going to do is it's going to actually take the pixels in your layer your texture layer and mathematically combine them they're RGB values with the pixel in the image layer beneath it I know that sounds kind of complicated but the bottom line is is that it's going to make your texture layer semi-transparent and it's going to combine its pixels with the pixels in your image resulting in a unique look and a unique composite and there are a lots of different blending modes to choose from you can pick different modes and which one works best is really up to you because it's going to depend on the images can depend on your texture and what you're combining but the ones that I like to use are normal which I've already showed you that's just the default multiply overlay soft light hard light and sometimes I'll use screen let me show you how that works I'm going to just go ahead and I'm going to delete my layer mask for the moment so I'm going to highlight the layer mask and then click the trashcan in the layers panel at the bottom here there's my pristine texture layer and to change the blending mode I'm going to go up to the layers panel again select the layer I'm interested in make sure it's highlighted and right here where it says normal that's the default blending mode normal is it represents the pixel without any kind of calculation with the layer beneath it and it's completely opaque let's just change it to multiply you can see that multiply creates a darkening effect overall but without doing any masking whatsoever I've made my top layer blend in with the lower layer and I have a textured composite here's overlay here's soft light here's hard light and here is screen now what you can see for each of these is that you get a different look and now we can start getting into more interesting texture blending modes so let's just put this back to multiply one about what you can do to make your textures more interesting and have more richness and depth in your images the way we're going to do that is by combining everything I showed you and then going beyond that by adding multiple layers okay so for any given layer you can choose a blending mode you can choose an opacity and you can choose whether or not you want to use a layer mask to do it so but by adding additional layers you can combine effects you can duplicate your texture layer to produce unique looks by mixing and matching with different opacities different blending modes different masks okay and by doing so you can have certain things overlaying others you can have different looks you can even combine different textures and make completely new resulting images and one of the things I like is that it gives you a more natural overlay look than you would by just masking something out by itself so I want to do that a little bit let me go into Photoshop here and let's take this image and let's just say I have this image and I'm going to go put it back to normal and I'm going to lower my opacity a little bit and let's add a mask and I'm just going to brush out with black where the butterfly is you the challenge with the mask is that when I use layer masking a lot of times you know it's really hard with your brush to make really good selections and if you're a master at Photoshop selection tools you can play with those but I find brushing tends to be the way to go it's just the simplest and most straightforward technique so what I can do now is what let's let's blend in on top of this a copy of our layer so I'm going to right click in the layers panel right here and choose duplicate layer now I get this little dialog box okay now it did everything including the mask so let's go ahead I'm going to select this mask and I'm going to just delete it so highlight the mask click the trashcan and now we'll change the blending mode to soft light or overlay lower the opacity a little bit and what this does is that it enables me to have a texture on top of my other texture including on top of my subject but because I'm using a different blending mode I don't need to mask it for it to appear and then with iterations I can combine different different looks or different layers and get different effects go back I can polish off things with my brush if I if I really feel the need to I can go back to my layer mask anytime switch to my white brush brush this in a little bit sort of clean up that edge so you can see the difference between having just the one texture overlay and adding the second texture overlay and you can just have fun with these there's a different image that I have go back to my textures drag one of these on our here and I'm just going to stretch this sucker out so this will be our recap we drag and drop from a browser on to an open Photoshop document resize it click enter and you can play around with blending modes to explore you can play around with masking if you do use a mask just make sure that you've highlighted the mask thumbnail and use your brush tool and I like to set the opacity pretty low like 10% even and just kind of build up the effects and if you need to paint the texture back on simply toggle with X key to the white paint the white foreground color and you can paint paint it back on and then let's have some fun I'm going to go back to my browser here find a different different texture look for something with an edge we'll put this one on so you can combine things Mitch mix-and-match for different looks once you're done with this and you know if you're using Photoshop what I recommend is going ahead and saving the file either in Photoshop format or as TIFF format with the layers preserved then you can come back in and tinker with your layer masks again it will save all that information you can go mess with that you can get rid of your layer masks you can you can change them around you can do all that stuff if you if you're not using Photoshop or if you're using a a tool that doesn't allow you to say layers you would have to start over every time that you wanted to do texture blending so I like that and a lot of times what I will do is I will save this image and then I will make finishing adjustments to it maybe curves clarity saturation over in Lightroom which is easier for me to work with do some final sharpening and then I've got it in my Lightroom catalog so those are that's the the fundamental techniques so just to recap what we had then was you open your image in Photoshop or your layering application you drag and drop if possible your your texture image onto the Photoshop window resize it hit enter so that it's set and then adjust a combination of blending modes opacity and layer masking to get the finished look and like I said the possibilities are really quite endless here you can just kind of mix and match anything for the kind of look that you want so now the real butt and what I want to end with is where do you go to get textures because there's some significant considerations that you need to make when you're looking to blend things it's not as easy as just stacking over to two images the first thing you can do is if you're ambitious you can make your own textures now it's actually a lot harder than I thought it would be you need to have the right the right texture you want it to be flat you could scan paper or canvas or whatever or use your camera but you're you're going to want to avoid any situation where it looks like you've got lens distortion or curvature a field in your in your image because that's going to be applied to your your composite and the other thing you want to make sure when you're doing textures is that you really need to get at least three thousand or more pixels on the long side and you probably watched when I was putting these textures into Photoshop that I had to resize them I was stretching them a little bit depending on the resolution of your camera that you're using you know a DSLR today is going to be able of capturing you know in some cases 24 or 36 megapixel images so you want a sufficient resolution in these JPEG files that you're going to use for textures so that if you do resize them you're not going to see significant or any obvious evidence of pixelation artifacts that would be a real problem it would just lend itself to being low quality so you can do that it's hard the other thing you can do is look for textures out there in the in the real world um they come in two flavors uh there you can search for free ones of which I have yet to find a whole lot of really good ones they're there but a lot of times you'll find files that are just way too low resolution or just aren't aren't well done or not good scans they're not they're just not good images but you know if you try hard enough you can spend a day look at looking for them but again you've got to look for those images that are going to have very high resolution and most of the stuff that I found online just doesn't have the necessary pixel resolution again we're looking for those three thousand or more pixels on the long side to really be a good file so we're talking six megapixels or higher otherwise they're just not going to scale well so a couple of different options that you can do you know the other thing and this is what I do is I go out and I buy my textures and I've purchased a whole bunch of textures over over the years and they're not they're not cheap they're not super expensive but I've recently released my own texture set now these I made I commissioned an artist to hand paint 25 these images and these were some of the ones that I was using in the class they're available from my website it's a big file download and and I scaled these to be six thousand pixels on the longest side so you've got plenty of resolution to use them and if you're interested in them as a per thanks for participating in the webinar today you can use this discount code abstract 15 and you'll save 15% off of the the download it just comes in a big zip file these or JPEG files and what you want to do is just save the JPEGs onto your computer put them in a folder somewhere and then just drag and drop them from say Bridge or photo mechanic or another file browser onto your Photoshop window the other textures that I use these are ones that I buy are from a company called flypaper textures they're in New Zealand I believe they're really nice lots of photographic textures some of the ones that I use today these are a little more expensive but they're very good and they're a little more subtle they are very fine detailed textures so they worked nicely when you've got blank areas to overlay most of them do not have extreme brushstrokes although some of them certainly do and they tend to be four thousand pixels or more and if you're interested in those I can provide a discount code there's a discount code on my website just go under discounts and you can can find a small discount from them you

Channel: Jason Odell

Views: 17,337

Keywords: texture blending, Adobe Photoshop, photography, digital art

Id: mfTac_tWsdo

Length: 40min 34sec (2434 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017