Weekly Photo Challenge: Adding a Texture to Your Photos

Adding a texture to your photographs adds another dimension to the image, and allows you to tell the ‘story’ of the images in another way.

The way it works in Photoshop:

1. Choose a texture. This is some texture I captured of a metal door at Tu Duc’s Tomb in Hue, Vietnam. I copied it and pasted it onto some photos of boats in the river in Hoi An.
2. Once it’s pasted onto the photo, hit multiply in the blending mode. Because my texture was vertical and my boat photos horizontal I had to scale the texture. Ultimately I scaled it even more as I found the bolts in the door distracting.
3. You can adjust the opacity of the texture layer to make the texture less obtrusive.
4. You can also wave the dodge tool over the areas you want to highlight to further lighten the texture.
5. I find that photos with textures applied often benefit by having a dark vignette around the edges, further emphasizing the subjects.
This last image of the two women was unfortunately a bit out of focus; with the texture applied this obscures the poor quality. Adding texture is a great way to add mood to old photos that are interesting but less than perfect in terms of focus.

Here I overlaid textures onto some old damaged photos of us at the beach when we were kids. I love the nostalgic mood it creates: http://elizabatz.com/2013/07/05/weekly-photo-challenge-nostalgia/

For more on this Weekly Photo Challenge : http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/texture/