Using textures in Photoshop

It appears many of you remember my Photoshop guides from years ago as I still get emails asking to create more to help you guys get the most out of your designs and creative ideas. As you may know I don't believe in making these guides extremely complex because many people reading this will have a copy of Photoshop installed but have really no idea how to use even the basic features. With this in mind I believe that a good guide should use simple procedures to let you get something useful and creative from the program with as little effort as possible.

So today I felt it might be helpful to show you something that will not only use Photoshop but incorporate another household item in 2009- your digital camera. Let's have a look at implementing a texture layer to get a creative end result.

Firstly, today I will be using Photoshop on the OSX Platform, but remember the 'control' key (Windows) and the command key (Macintosh) give the same result so its universal to use the exact same techniques described today between platforms.

If you are a budding Photographer I am hoping you will have a nice folder of images on your hard drive which can used for this guide today. They don't have to be technical masterpieces to be usable, but the subject of the image will obviously have a huge impact on the end result. Landscape and scenery images, such as solitary trees make for an ideal subject however it is a somewhat overused concept so I am going to use something a little different today myself. I also wanted to focus on elements that would look great in black and white, because although colour is wonderful in the right context, there are still many opportunities to stun with black and white.

Incidentally the images in this article today are displayed in a different manner than most of the Driverheaven articles. I wanted you to be able to get access to the full sized files so we have removed our normal image display code and are using standardised click throughs. Any images you wish to download to your computer to help you with this guide simply right click and 'save as'.

What is a texture?

It isn't rocket science - the natural world is rich in various textures. The surface of any object is textured at a specific level. If you put a microscope over your hand you would see that it is made up of tiny pores. Equally so, if you study a brick or a rock you will see that they are made up of a surface which has a specific 'texture'.

Next time you go out for a stroll at the weekend or head somewhere for a photo shoot start to look at objects in a different way. Don't just take a picture of a tree for instance, walk up to it, and if you have a little pocket camera, change it to the macro setting, focus on the bark and get a nice clear picture. When you get home, open the image and zoom it in to 100%. It really is that easy to get a good texture shot.

Recently for instance I was at a local harbour to take some pictures of the boats as they arrived and set sail and I noticed an old, slightly rotting boat moored at the far edge of the harbour.

If you study the boat above you will see that the wood surface is crumbling and that there is great variation between highlight and shadow areas and the fine detail on the surface is going to be great for a 'texture image'. As I could hardly walk across the water to get a macro shot I used the upper end of my zoom lens to get as clear a shot of the textured surface as possible.

So far we have the basis for a great texture overlay, now we need to find a suitable image to 'superimpose' this image onto.

The image above is a zoomed in image of an unusual marine plant growth on a rock near the ocean in Ireland. The high level of zoom gives a pin point focus on the plant itself while the shubbery in and rock in front is blurred, giving a great depth of field effect. While this image isn't going to win any awards for content, it will be a good indication shortly of how you can end up with a black and white image and some creative use of texture.

The next thing we do is open the plant life image in Photoshop (I am using Macintosh CS4 here). Then we want to convert it to black and white.

Converting to black and white (grayscale) is found on the image menu within Photoshop. Once this is done then we want to alter the curves to give the image more "punch".

To open Curves you select the key command Command M (Control M on windows). this brings up the curve palette. The Curves pallette is a very important tool within Photoshop that works in a similar fashion to Levels. Both tools have their uses for specific requirements. The next thing you do is to drag the top, then the bottom of the palette curve as shown in the image below.

As you can see by the highlighted areas above you are moving either edge of the "curve" by one full grid point to the left and right respectively. This has the effect of giving the image more contrast both in the highlight area and the shadow area. There are easier ways of altering the contrast via the specific commands for instance, but future guides will be using the 'curves' and 'levels' functionality within Photoshop so it is important to play about with these now so you have a better grounding with them later.

The outcome of this small change is that we can see the image is now more vibrant within the grayscale range, it is important to make some adjustments with moving to black and white images as they can tend to look rather flat and lifeless if originally shot on the camera in colour. It is also worth pointing out that if you shoot in RAW on a modern day SLR you can adjust all these settings on the fly within the RAW editor program.

The next thing you want to do is open the texture image, hit command A (to select all the image) then command C (to copy it). then highlight the picture of the altered plant life and command V (to paste it into it). You will notice the texture has changed from colour to black and white. Obviously as the original image was changed earlier to grayscale the same effect will happen to the new layer. It is also worth pointing out that if you use two images of different dimensions then you will need to resize them to fit by selecting all on the smaller image by resizing the corner handles with the mouse via Command/Control T. If you use my images to perform the guide then they are both shot on the same camera with the same settings so are perfectly matched.

Next you need to make sure you can see the layers Pallette in Photoshop. If you can't then go to the Window menu and select the Layers option. You can see in the image above that our layer is enabled and that the menu is visible on the screen. You will also notice the two layers now on the same image. the foreground wood layer and the background image of the plantlife (image right, above).

The next thing is to alter the blend the foreground image of the texture ontop of the lower layer of the plantlife, to do this select the layer menu pallette and select the blending mode of overlay.

We can now see that the top texture image is overlayed onto the lower plantlife photograph from earlier. We can now tweak the image to make fine adjustments. (continue to page 2).