Digital Diversity

Texture blending in Photoshop is when you use the layer blending modes to give an image or part of an image a texture. In this tutorial I will show you how to create the bellow image to give a person a stony/cracked appearance. This is a very clever technique to learn and it opened a lot of doors for me in my digital art.

You will need to understand how masks work, as well as adjustment layers, so it’s a good idea to read my tutorials that involve these beforehand.

The image we are going to create is of a man with a textured face.

The images I used for this tutorial are taken from a free stock library called stock.xchng.  You will need to download them both (or you can find your own to use)

Man – http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1213518

stone texture – http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1185601

Open up the picture you want to add a texture to.

On the layer above the image add the texture image (the stone texture).

With the texture layer selected, change the layer blending mode to Hard Light.

Add a mask to the texture layer. Use the mask so that the texture only affects the subject where needed. In this case, that would be the head and neck.

The texture is currently a bit strong so I reduced the layers opacity to 44%.

Look at the image and decide what parts of the subject dont need the texture. For this image I decided that the eyes, eye brows and lips don’t need any texture. Paint these areas in black on the mask. I also decided that the very short hair on the top of the head only needed a hint of the texture showing. To do this I changed the brushes opacity to about 30% and then lightly went over the mask in black till it was faint enough to look right.

Now that the texture is in the right place its time to sort out the colouring of the image. First i want to get rid of all the extra yellow on the face. To do this use a Photo Filter adjustment layer on the face picture. Selected deep blue and a Density of about 76%.

Next I wanted to get rid of all the excess texture lurking in the shadow area of the image. You will want hints of it there, but most of it is not needed. Select your texture layers mask. Using a large soft black brush at about 30%, slowly hide the texture in the shadows till it blends in smoothly.

I now want to make my texture grey scale. This is for 2 reasons. Firstly the colours are interfering with the face. Secondly it will help give the colder, stoney look that I want for this image. To do this create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer above the texture layer. Make sure it only effects that layer by linking them (hold down alt and click between the texture layer and the adjustment layer so the adjustment layer indents). Then move the saturation slider all the way to the left. I also increased the lightness slightly.

The image is now too red. Add a new Hue/Saturation layer above the face image. Select the Reds channel. Adjust the sliders till you get the look your after. In this case I wanted a fairly pale but natural tone.

To finish of the texture I want certain parts of it to be more prominent, such as the cracks on the forehead. To do this duplicate the texture layer. Then make sure both textures are linked to the Hue/Saturation layer so they look as they do in the image below (Alt click between the 2 texture layers and then the top texture layer and the adjustment layer). Then use the mask on the copy of the texture layer to hide all but the cracks on the forehead and any other parts you want to stand out more.

The final touches I did were:

- Sharpened the main image layer
- Increased the contrast of the image as a whole
- Increased the reds in the eyes and slightly on the lips to make them stand out more

With this fairly basic method of adding textures you can create much more complex image. You dont always have to use Hard Light either. Try soft light, Overlay and any of the other modes to get the effect you want. The best way to get the look you want is trial and error.

This same technique can be used to add textures to whole pictures. In the below image I used the same texture twice except I flipped one of them. I used Soft light and then added a colour overlay using a Hue Saturation adjustment layer with colorize ticked.

I also used this technique to create the textures on these images:

Tags: adjustment layers, advanced masks, blending, colour correction, colour pop, colours, contrast, elements, flowers, highlights, hue, layer blending, layers, levels, lighting, masking, masks, photo editing, photography, photoshop, saturation, shadows, sharpening, texture blending, thoughts, tutorial, tutorials

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 11:10 and is filed under photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.