Texturing Photos

After watching Phaunt Actions's tutorial on adding texture to pictures I knew I wanted to try this hot trend in photography.  I waited for the right opportunity to come along and sure enough, it did.  A couple of weeks ago I did a shoot for this lovely little girl.  This picture was certainly not one of the best from the shoot  - especially since I ended up reflecting a little too much light into her face, and had a little flare around the bottom edge.  But her sinister express and dark clothing made it a perfect candidate for the Halloween card and I told the mom as much.

So I wasn't surprised when she contacted me the other day to ask me to mock up a Halloween card using the picture.  I knew this was the perfect opportunity to try out texturing.   I definitely had some ideas for what I wanted too.

My first step was to desaturate the picture because I wanted the final to be black and white.  I knew I wanted to start out with a brocade style fabric.  The tutorial recommended Texture King as a place to go for free textures and sure enough, under their fabrics category they had something I thought would work perfectly.

You can see I had a lot of layers for this image.  The first texture layer was the brocade which I also desaturated and put in the overlay blend mode.  Using a layer mask I removed most of the texture from her face and arms leaving it heavily in the rest of the picture.  I definitely wanted it to be the dominate texture.  I positioned the layer so that the center swirly area would be over her clothes where it would really come through.

The second layer was from the grunge category on Texture King.  It looks like stained cement.  Again, in overlay mode and using a mask to back it off on the face and arm.    I made a copy of the merged version of the image and burned the edges some.  Then I decided I still wanted to add a little more texture.  So I made a copy of the brocade layer to deepen it.  I brought in a final texture that was like a bubbling/pealing paint texture. 

I wanted to warm up the picture a little bit so I ran the Antique Tone action from my Totally Rad Action Mix (Boutwell Studio).  It gave it the perfect amount of warmth and even helped to highlight some of the texture in the picture.    Here's the final result.  The mom loved it.

Comments

[digital photography]

Very interesting results you get. Though it looks a bit gloomy. It is a kind of gothic picture i'd say. It is something extraordinary.

[Kylie (phaunt)]

Looks great!