Tutorial: Textured photos.

Today I thought I would share a tutorial on how to do textured photos.

Textures are a great way to enhance the feel/mood of the photo. They are great if you just want to try something different for a change!

So first of all you need to find yourself some great textures. There are millions you can buy and also lot's of free ones available. {just remember to check the license on the free ones as some can only be used for personal use, whereas others allow you to use them for personal and commercial use.}
A great place for awesome vintage textures is playing with brushes on flickr.

For this tutorial I used Adobe Photoshop CS3



I am going to show you how to get this effect:
Step 1: So open your editing program.
And then the photo and texture. I used two different textures in this case.

Step 2:
Place your first texture over your photo. Just drag and drop and resize it with the controls on the corner of the image. Then go to your little drop down menu under layers in the tool box on the right {where it says normal} scroll down to "soft light". This is also called Blend modes. I left mine at 100%.


Step 3: Now highlight your second texture and then in the file menu up top, go to "image" then "adjustments" and then "hue/saturation".
Step 4: a box pops up once you have done step 3 . tick the colorize box. Play around with the hue and saturation to get a color of you choice. I went with a pink color.


step 5: Now drag this layer onto your photo layer. So now you should have one image with 3 layers. Your bottom layer is your photo, the second a texture (with soft light) and the 3rd another texture with a color added. (repeat step 2 at this stage-first highlight the top layer you just added)step 6: Now merge all visible layers and save as a JPEG.
And there you go! A lovely soft, texture feel to your original photo!


There are a lot of different effects you can get using textures so why not play around by changing the opacity, and blending mode. Here are some more examples!
Enjoy!