Lessons

Lesson Info

Texture Effects

Textures are another thing I wanted to get into because I am a huge fan of textures, I have a massive library, I collect textures from Adobe Stock of course but I also use my phone a lot when I'm traveling and stuff like that, I'll go around and just, and I probably get weird looks, 'cause I'll walk up to a wall, just like a brick wall and stand right in front of it and people see me taking a picture of a brick and they're... But I know what I'm doing. But I'll just pay attention, your radar has always got to be on, when I'm in conferences, you know where I get my best textures, funny enough? Vegas. Every time I've gone to Vegas, I always go on a little photo walk and I just, I'm hunting for textures, just seeing what's interesting out there. I'll take pictures of the grate or the surface of an escalator and those little grit lines and everything like that, there's design elements out there all over the world and we're at a great time in history for, because we have an acquisition devi...

ce on us all the time, our phones take really great shots. So we can go out and just take pictures, it used to be I just took reference shots but I'm using a lot of my images from my phone in my design work nowadays. I'm getting that good of resolution out of it. So you can never go wrong with having a large library of textures. So let's go in, I just want to show you a few cool things with textures and I don't... This is, there's a funny story behind me getting this image, this is a stock image from Adobe Stock but I did not intend on licensing it. I licensed it by accident 'cause I was just searching for images for a particular project I was working on and somehow I accidentally license this one. One day I was just looking at it and I was like, "You know what, I'm gonna make something out of it," I'm not gonna let that credit go to waste. So, took it into this texture and I'm just gonna go ahead and start by dragging and dropping it over. And before I apply the effects to it, I like to go ahead and just make it, position it where I want it in the composition so I'm gonna scale her up just a little bit here, position it right to the side there, there we go. So in our layers, we've got the texture and the background and the subject right here. So the first thing is I want to make a duplicate of the subject layer, I want to have two copies 'cause I'm gonna run two different effects on the subject and I need them to be on two different layers so make the duplicate, I'm gonna turn that duplicate off for the moment and select the original. We're gonna go to the filter menu and this again goes back to experimenting with filters in ways they probably weren't designed for. I'm gonna go to the texture settings and go to grain. Now grain actually gives you a really interesting effect here as you can see right there. You've got a variety of grain types here, you've got soft, it really depends on what effect you're going for. For the most part, all the rest of these I have found mostly useless. But speckle, I don't know, has a really interesting look about it. You can actually dial the intensity and how much contrast element you want to have there, I'm actually gonna pull that back a little bit and setting the contrast to zero obviously has it a little too dark and once you get into, this is quite a jump, it goes from zero to one and look at that difference. No idea why but the more contrast you get, obviously the more cartoony, I guess you wanna say, more illustrated it becomes. I don't want it to be quite that much, I'm gonna put this at around 15. There we go. So we click OK. Now, to build the density, I mean the effect looks really good but to build the density of color and contrast, I'm gonna go to the Edit menu, now this is something you have to do the moment after you apply the filter because if you do anything else, this feature will not be available, it's like a Snapchat filter. It will go away if you don't use it. I don't know why I made that reference, I don't use Snapchat so... Anyway, it's this under Edit menu, you've got this fade feature here, this is only available after you apply the filter 'cause PhotoShop knows you just applied a filter, do you want to apply a fade to it. If you go and do another filter effect or anything like that, it will, if you do another filter, it will give you the fade effect for that filter but if you do another change or anything like that then that fade filter goes away. What it does if I got into the Edit menu, go to fade grain, you can actually modify the opacity and the blend mode of the filter as it applies to the image. You're not changing the blend mode or the opacity of the image itself, you're changing how the filter interacts with the photo. So if I go in here and change this to something like overlay, it's gonna get a lot more contrast, still maintaining that look but we're getting a lot more density in the color. In fact, I'm gonna do soft light I think just to make it a little bit less contrasty. But even if you get a blend mode and you still think it's a tad extreme, just dial back the opacity. The opacity is just one way of putting the opacity, it's like undo on a slider. So instead of just doing a full undo, you can vary the degree of undo that you have. So soft light and 75% looks pretty good there so there's that. Now, I'm gonna go and change the blend mode here to multiply and what multiply does is it basically removes the white point of the image and establishes the texture below as the new white point. So all the light areas of the image now take on that yellow texture, yellow from the texture below. If we zoom in here, you can see. It kind of gives it that kind of subtle, old fashioned look to it. But, why stop there? I'm gonna turn that layer off for the moment. Now we're gonna go to the duplicate layer I created just a moment, at the very beginning. Here, I'm gonna take this and go to filter and go to stylize, find edges and it's gonna kind of create this kind of outline look about it and I'm gonna use levels just to kind of boost the contrast of those. And I wanna have these kind of subtle lines, almost like this was sketched and you can just kind of see the subtle sketch lines in there. Now it did have a little bit of a color element to it based on the original image, I'm simply gonna remove that color, Shift + Command + U and then I wanna blend it to the texture just like I did with the other one by changing it to multiply so multiply renders all the white areas invisible leaving the texture visible and there's the lines there. Now I am also gonna dial back the opacity of that line layer a little bit but I am also gonna add a color cast to it. This is what I was talking about earlier is affecting the temperature of the image by doing a simple hue saturation so just press Command or Control + U, activate colorize and we're gonna kind of go with the same yellowish of the background here. You can really see the difference there. Helps it blend to that texture a little bit more. And then turn off that for the moment. Now back to this layer. Now, for this layer, I'm gonna go in here and Option click the layer mask and that's going to hide the image entirely, filling it with black. Now I wanna bring back in the image but now I'm gonna paint it back in by using a particle brush so let's go in here and get, I got this one right here. And let's paint with white. And now if I go in here and just start dabbing. So I'm just kind of dabbing and just kind of revealing it in here, I turn on my outline layer. You almost get this kind of unfinished illustrated look with this kind of cool spatter effect on there. But there is that finished effect so it's really quickly taking a photo and blending it to a texture using the... And the key thing is that brush. I'll add this brush I'm using right here to the set that I make available for this class as well 'cause it will take too long to create that, a lot of things going on here so I just will make it available for the download. How did you rotate the brush while you were using it? It looked like it was rotating It is, I wasn't doing it manually, it is actually being affected by the shape dynamics here so I've got angle jitter set to 100% so it is doing each time I dab and that's why I dabbed instead of clicking and painting 'cause it will randomize it but I like, and when, I just like to get and just... So if you're using a mouse, you would just keep clicking. I just call it dabbing because I'm doing this. You'll notice, each time I dab, watch the rotation of the brush, it just varies each time. And that's why you're getting that randomization there. That came out really nice so I'm gonna save it. Actually, I'm gonna show you another one, kind of a similar to what I just did but this is a lot less illustrated, if you wanted to do more of a photographic texture blend. And again, this is one of those things where once you realize you can blend an image on a texture with that multiply mode, you actually can achieve some really interesting looks by just bringing this image here of this guy and this is a really cool shot. Again, this is a stock image but this really cool shot of this guy just on the background with the glasses and everything like that but just bringing it in this image on the texture and just simple matter of changing the blend mode to multiply instantly makes it a more interesting photo 'cause now that texture is appearing through the lighter areas. If I just go back to normal, you can see it's, you know, where the lighter areas are and that's where you gotta kinda think about is when you're looking at an image, the brightest areas are gonna be your visible texture and just instantly that makes it a little bit more interesting there and you can actually go and add more interest to it, if I zoom in here, looks pretty good but if you go and run that same grain filter I just did, click OK, look at that. Now we're getting this more kind of illustrated blend so you can get more of a graphic effect to it. But I'm not gonna use the particle element, I wanted to keep it kind of a more of a photo element here and you can build composites this way. If I take this image of the bridge, let's go to filter, actually I'm gonna remove color. And then drag it over. Once again, we'll set this to multiply. Actually first, let's blend the edge here. So I just nudged him over a little bit, make room for the bridge but I do have a hard edge here I don't want so I'm just gonna use a simple layer mask, keep a little fade there, there we go, put this guy in here, same thing, I'm gonna put a little fade on it. But like I did with the outline of the other one to make it look like it's more part of the texture, let's just put a little color cast on it. And if you bring the lightness up a little bit, you can kind of get that faded look like it's illustrated on there, it's kind of worn out look here. So you can get this kind of vintage look just by blending with these textures. So you can see how important textures are as a design element so keeping a large library of these can be very helpful in just achieving, the cool thing is if you're on a pinch, on a pinch, in a pinch as a designer, you wanna get some wow factor pretty quickly, this is one way of doing that so it's good to have those little quick tips in your arsenal that you can throw something together really quickly. The client does know you need to be, you did it quickly. But as long as they're happy, everybody's happy.