Lessons

Lesson Info

Applying Textures

All right, so won't apply some texture this is just a base image I might wantto apply texture to I took this shot at the neon bone yard in las vegas he and bone yard it's nice because they try to uh when they're turning down an old casino or an old building they try to talk them into donating the sign which is nice so you can go and see all sorts of old vegas son now when it comes to textures, we could either shoot our own textures or we can create them and so let's talk about first applying ones that you've shot, so here are some examples anytime I'm out and I just see some interesting grungy texture, I usually end up taking photographs of it these are just a few examples of random shots that I've taken for this one my wife karen took er and I end up storing those if you end up using light room by chance, I have what's called a collection and light room that is called textures in any time I finished shitting in particular area. I'm reviewing my pictures and I noticed one of these rand...

om things that I shot I drag it over to the collection called textures been that way I can actually find them because otherwise I never remember when I shot one because they're just kind of random that I run into them so I'm just gonna open one of these textures and let's see a few different methods of applying them so I have two images open now I'm just going to select all in copy this one so command a for select all comand see for copy how close it and then I got this image I'm just going to paste it and if they're shot in two different cameras because sometimes you upgrade cameras get a higher resolution one and you'd shot a texture years ago which is lower resolution you might need to scale them to get them to be appropriately sized so after you paste it in what you might want to do is type uh command tea for transform or go to the edit menu and choose free transform that's what that keyboard shortcut is four and you can see if that image was any larger than the one you've brought it into here I can see that transpiration rectangle showing me where the edges of that picture are and when you're in the middle of transforming something if you type command zero that's control zero in windows it will zoom out until you can see the handles so that if one was much higher resolution than the other you might find that the handles are way beyond the edge of your screen when you choose free transform eso typing command zero is nice it zooms out so you can see the handles I don't mind scaling up textures if I shot him with an older camera that was lower resolution because most of the time, the textures or something that don't contain really release mall find critical detail. I'm not going to notice so much if it's slightly soft because the image itself it's being applied to is gonna have the crisp detail, and so I don't mind using lower resolution textures and scaling them up. There is a limit, you know I'm not going to take one the size of my thumbnail and and scale it up to the size of a high rise, but it's okay, if I'm gonna end up doubling its size, that kind of thing, then one way of applying a texture show your images just changed the blending mode. The blending mod menu is found at the top of the layers panel is just a pop up menu it's usually set to normal, and you could cycle through all of these modes. The most common modes that I end up using are usually overlay and soft light, but if I want to experiment with all of these, there is a way to quickly switch between them just to see what they do you first want to switch to the move tool. In with the move to alack tive all I'm going to do is hold down the shift key I have it held down right now and then I compress the plus or the minus keys on my keyboard when I do that it's going to change the blending mode of this layer and so I'm just gonna hold downshift and hit the plus he over and over again to cycle through all the bloody modes that air there just remember you have to have the move to allow active first so I'm holding shift right now I'm hitting the plus sign and you can see how it applies with various modes don't always know which one's going to be best with each image this one dark and mowed looks kind of interesting if I hide the top player you see what its end up doing I'm just going to continue through and I'll just remember whenever I see something I like I'll look up at my layers panel and try to remember what's there so dark and millet actually think it looks kind of interesting in the middle of the letter p so I'll remember darken and if any of these modes or too much like you like the effect overall but it's just too strong you can lower the opacity of the layer it'll lessen the effect and that's kind of interesting color dodge not in the middle of the letter p but on the outer part that's nice over lank softly yeah overlay and soft light or the two that I apply the most because it's just just about any pattern you put on there any texture is gonna look not bad in that mode hard light also looks kind of interesting in some areas so then after we've gone through these modes and figured out which ones we liked then we could do a few things with this what I'm going to do is choose one of the modes that I like did not like dark and mode for the middle of the letter p so I'll choose darkened mode and then tow limit where the supplies to my image I can add a layer mask so the bottom my layers panel there's that icon that is a circle inside of a rectangle that adds a layer mask if I click on it then I can grab my brush tool I can paint with black black ends up hiding things in a mask and so I could just come in here and paint wherever I would like to not apply this one little trick when you're painting is if you click in one spot and you hold on the shift key and click in another it'll connect the dots is if you painted a straight line between the two areas so sometimes I just click hold shift click and to get around straight areas so now I have a limited what so cool shift I never then, like lower the opacity of this toe, lessen its strength if I want or bring it up. And then I also like the different mode for outside of the letter p so what I can end up doing then it's, just duplicate this layer. Remember there's, a keyboard shortcut for duplicating where jumped something new, a new layer with command j I'll just type command j and then we have our mask. I'm going to click on the mask in white allows the image to show up black hides it. And what I want to do in this particular case is put the texture and the opposite area. So instead of being the middle letter p it's on the outside, so I really want the mask to look like the exact opposite of what it is to do that I can go to. The image menu well is long asked. My layer that iss is long is the mask is active. If you look, you can either have the picture active or the mask and you can tell by looking at the corners. So as long as the mask is active, I can come up here and choose image adjustments invert. I usually just type command ike's. They use it all the time and now it's applied in the exact opposite area outside of letter p and I'm just going to cycle through our bloody modes again, I'll be in the move tool hold shift and just going here hit the plus side. I like multiply a bit, maybe like that I'm in color dodge mode, and I could just suggest the opacity control how much of it so I want to apply because that could be a sense for how how we can apply this texture. Now I want to show you a bunch of different ways of limiting where the texture is applied to your image. So far, we've looked at a layer mask now no, with later mass I'd usually be more careful when I was here, I can notice some defects in my layer mask if you look in my layers panel can you see how there's some little holes in my mask out here there's various areas? I could just click on that mask again to make it active, grab my paintbrush tool and wherever that I have that little hole I could paint because that means there was an area down there where the, uh, texture was still being applied. I could click on the mask above, paint with white and paint over there again to touch it up, but I'd usually just depend more careful in the first place now let's see this one here is being applied in the middle of the letter p let's see if there's another way I can limit where it effects the image I like it being applied to the bright parts of the image I might not like it on the dark parts or where there's a neon tube in there maybe I don't want it on parts of the neon tube if it's the knee on two boards not based on brightness but just based on location I continue painting on my mask where I could come in here and there's a few tricks let's take a look at him right now I'd like to get it off of the neon tube that's under here if I turn off the eyeball I can see the neon tube you see the white part right here if I turned it back on though it's covered up and I can't see it so it's hard to tell where I need to paint so here's a trick I can hide this layer but then I can show this mask that's here is an overlay in to do that is long as you have the mask active so my layers panel see my mask is active it's got the corners highlighted I can go into my keyboard and hit the back slash key backslash keys right above the return her in tricky and your keyboard and what it causes it to do is show a red overlay for ah, your mask wherever you have black in your mask, it'll cover up your picture with red to show you where it is you could do that if the layers visible or invisible, you just need to have the mask active than hit that backslash key. So now if I come in here yeah, I could grab a brush, get a brush it's about the same width is that tube of neon and I'm painting with black black hides things I can click hold shift I don't know if I got the exact right with here or not might need to go the tiniest bit smaller enough to manually paint around the corner and you can't shift click around a corner uh, unless it's a sharp corner if it's not rounded you could some people get addicted to shift clicking and you can tell because when they have curves like this instead of painting, they'll have little shift clicks whereto look like little straight lines instead of a smooth curve, so I'll be one of those people because I'm lazy at the moment but just know anywhere you paint with black you're going to hide things from this layer the layer is hidden right now so I can see what's underneath it's I wanted this a lineup with what's underneath when I'm done I just turned the eyeball back on on that layer to make it visible and now if you look at our texture, it's no longer applying to that little neon tube that's there by chews on do a few times let's. See if I can get back to the point before I had painted. Now, let's. See if I go back, I only have twenty undoes. Come on, turn that eyeball back on there. Do you see the difference? But that's for me painting on that mask just you know, to get multiple undoes. All you need to do is take the standard undo keyboard shortcut, which most people are used to because people mess up all the time. That's command z and just add to command z, just hold down if you're on a mac. The option key ultima windows, huh? And you could get multiple windu's up to twenty of them with default settings and that's. What I was typing to go back multiple steps so I could show you before and after. Okay, so there I hit the back slash key to get my overlay. I can hit backslash again and turn it back off and then just turn the eyeball back on in that layer. And now you can see where I don't have it on the neon tubes, either there are other ways we can limit where textures applied let's work on the other texture, the texture that is being applied to the surrounding area. If I turn off the eyeball there, you'll see what it looked like without the texture turning back on and here's after let's say, I don't like that that texture is applying to the dark portion of the image. If you look at the dark portion of the surrounding image, I'm thinking about the areas down in here, this little area where the pain is peeled away in up here at the top on the upper right when I turned the texture on that's. Why I don't like it so much, I like it on the area that's, orange, so here's, another way we can limit where it affects the image. I'm going to go to the bottom of my layers panel I got the layer that contains that texture active gonna click on the letters f x and that's where I'm gonna find a choice called blending options muse blending options once before wanna get blending options? We have two choices, this layer or underlying layer, and I'm going to use the one called underlying layer that's going to think about whatever the image looks like underneath, and if I pull in this slider, it's going to make the dark parts of what's underneath show through the texture. So the texture disappears in those areas so watch what happens in these really dark areas and see if you notice the texture starting to disappear I might have to pull it in quite a distance but you see it's starting to happen you see but it does it in a way where it has a crisp edge on it and usually you wanted to have ah gradual transition so what I need to do is take this slider and split it in half just like before you hold on the option key alton windows which I have held down right now and split it in half like that in that allows you to get a soft transition so I can say well exactly how much I wanted disappear and how much do I want a fade out now we don't have the texture in the shadowy areas or the dark stuff you want to see before and after I'll turn the preview track box in the upper right off here's before where the textures applying and in the whole surrounding area and here's after you see where it's being limited where it's not showing up so much in the dark portion of the image but it's based completely on brightness in the way photoshopped thinks about it is this if you look at these sliders is thinking about the underlying image so that's like the original image this is being applied to the letter p and anything over here on this side is going to be completely hidden uh, from the texture texture is going to go away anywhere it's overlapping something on the other line image that we'd be in this brightness range it's being allowed to apply to things that are in this brightness range on the underlying image complies is it normally would and then in between these two little halves is words fading out, so anything in this brightness ranges where it slowly fading out so we can use that in concert with painting on the mask because that got it out of the dark portions of the underlying image. But over here, there's still some bright part so the underlying image we're showing up in that I might not want it, so I just make sure my mask is active. Paying with black with a mask is active hides things so I could come in here to say also get off those little bright portion so so far we have two ways of limiting where are texture shows up. One was painting on the mask black hides things and the other was to use blending sliders we get to the bloody and sliders by clicking on the letters f x at the bottom of our layers panel and you choose choice called blending options let's look at a different picture and let's go grab a different texture by the way that's I think that's the same bridge as the other picture you saw my bus completely different year because this badge is no longer there they've paved over on and it was shot from the other direction but same bridge just by coincidence s o do that and I'll go find a texture now if you haven't been shooting textures like this and you don't have a large collection of them uh then you can acquire textures many different ways you'll find some websites that just have free textures to download usually the free texture websites don't have the highest quality textures though because we're just kind of like random ones you might have found and then there are companies that end up selling them and so you can get full texture packs and so I'm gonna show you some commercial ones here here are some from a company called flypaper and if you look at him they're going to end up painting on canvas for you and then photographing it or scratching paper and then photographing it and doing all sorts of things where you can get a wide variety of textures so that if you don't want to go out and shoot him yourself and you just want a huge variety you can get them very quickly of I think it's flypaper textures dot com if I remember correctly if I'm wrong on the l just google flypaper textures and you can find these and this is just an example of one of their packs, so let's say I want to apply one of these textures to my image all I'm going to need to dio is the same thing we did with any image is I select the texture I'd like to work with, you open it, I could select on copy just like we did before I just type command and command see which does that for me take this image and paste and remember if the image is way larger or smaller, you can type command t command team means free transform and then I type command zero to zoom out to say how big is that texture? That section was pretty high rez pretty huge, and so I happen to scale it down so that it was more appropriate for this particular image and then usually I end up using over layer soft light this is a starting point, he and I can come in here and get the tax chair. If I turn off the eyeball for this, you'll see before and after with my texture and then often times I end up coming in with that texture I goto blending options and I say, well, I want to not have the texture uniformly I applied to my image, I'm going to let the dark parts of the underlying image show through and get a smooth transition by splitting the slider I might also let the bright parts of the image show through and get a soft transition just remember to get a soft transition you have to hold on the option key and to separate the sliders by letting both the highlights in the shadows show through it won't feel is generic in your application of it so I choose undo here's before and here's after I'm just letting some of that bridge throat show through some of the dark portions show through so it's not quite as even and then finally I can have a mask and if I want this area to stand out I might just say hey take the texture off of there so that stands out on paying with white to bring it back around the edge there are other ways of doing this that you could make it much faster let's look at an example of that there's a website of a friend of mine his name is russell brown and his website is russell brown dot com and he has on his website a section that is a script you can download for free that has to do with textures and I have that script installed it has an installer if you downloaded just double click on the installer to access it, I go to the window menu choose extensions and then here I have adobe paper texture dhobi paper texture no, I don't want to see the video I can show you a video of how to use portions of it s o this is using flypaper textures as well the same company I just showed you some example textures off and you couldn't get a certain number of free textures from them if you download the script remember you get the script from russell brown dot com in the scripts area and here's what makes this so much easier than what we've done up until now? He's come up with this panel to make it faster and what you do is you can choose a blending mode up here remember I used overlay or soft light the most so I might want to start with that. And then here you have a serious of textures that get for free from flypaper you click on the texture and it will automatically open the textures, scale the texture to the right size and set the blending mode of the layered overlay and at a layer mask so that you could just start painting to limit where it shows up. If you don't like that texture, you'll notice in this little panel the textural have a red border around the one you've already applied just hit it again into removing it couldn't do that because when it applies thes textures, it uses a very unique name for the layer and it just says delete the layer of that exact name so it can figure out that hey there's this layer I put in with this very exact name we could just delete that layer again and so I could come in here and try out a bunch of these and you see it's much faster than going in and just copying and pasting and scaling and changing the mode and adding masks and all that kind of stuff right? Well, you might think that you'd be limited to using flypaper textures with this you're not you can use your own textures use anybody's textures it's just nice that it comes with some months that air free from flypaper you can also apply more than one texture you notice here I have to with the little red borders on him that means I've got two layers with it and I ain't coming here apply three and four and five if you want to get ridiculous uh then just turn him off if you don't want to be ridiculous by uh clicking in yours ta gillingham on or off but just so you're aware this panel expects that all you're going to do is use this panel to apply your texture if you do anything in the layers panel it won't be aware that you did it meaning if I throw away this layer manually it'll still show a red border over here thinking it's still applied it's not intelligent enough to know that I did something manually over there and if I click it here to remove the texture it'll just you know, make the red border disappear also, if I click on one of these to apply it and then I change this menu up here this is not goingto interactively change the layer that to my layers panel instead this is saying the next texture I apply is going to use that load if I want to, uh, change the mode of one that already exists I needed click on it and I need to manually change it over here in my layers, pal. But doesn't this make it so much faster to apply image based textures? Thanks to russell brown? Russell brown works at adobe and so he knows a lot of people that could do scripting in photo shop and he ends up talking them into creating these useful little scrips also at the very bottom there is a button if you really just aren't sure what you want randomizer. If you click on the randomizer button it's gonna automatically applied to textures at random so you just hit randomizer and it picked the two textures for you I had these in multiply mode multiplied darkens things s o that's not going to be quite so good let's turn those off by clicking on there outlines what use overlay instead with overlay, you can easily get away with two textures, so we'll do that hit it again, it'll pick two different textures, so if you just weren't sure what you wanted, you could sit here and randomizer over and over and over again. You know, it's, uh, I don't remember the iphone app urban spoon, you just shake your phone and it says you were to go to dinner, it looks like, uh, what you call it in vegas slot machine and you just shake your phone and as it so I used to use it if somebody couldn't decide where they wanted to go, I said, fine, this will decide and that's kind of the same thing here. So anyway, we've gotten these textures applied looks kind of nice, and so now we automatically have our masks I've mentioned so far painting on the masks. Let me hide these two layers and work in the layer that's underneath, you're not limited to painting on the masks. I could come in here and use something like the quick selection tool, and I could click and drag within my image to make a selection like that and then turn these layers back on. If you have a selection, you could always make the selection first, then grab your paintbrush tool and just paint, you know. No to limit where your paint shows up, you get only paint where the selection is or when you have a selection active, just go to the edit menu and choose phil it just tell photoshopped hey, fill this with black and that's going to remove the texture as well, so if you don't feel like painting instead, you feel like making selections to do your work. Uh, that's what you could do, and if you happen to apply more than one texture like this, we could also select these two layers. I'm going to throw these two layers into a folder remember those folders wearing type command gto group? Um, and then with that active in the newest version of photo shop in photo shop, see a six? I believe I could go to blending options and remember those sliders now, it's going to affect all of the layers that are inside that folder? That could be three different layers full of textures that are being applied, and I can come in here and say, ok, let the dark part of the image come back. You see, the corners of the image don't have texture anymore or do the opposite say, let the bright parts so the middle part there, come back here, you bring it way over. So that if I choose on dude, you see it's limiting the texture so that it's removing it from the bright part of the image so you can do that by putting it into a folder than when the folder is active just go down here and she's blending options whatever those sliders wherever you do to him will affect all the layers inside the folder in a different way of doing this. So remember to get this panel, which is the adobe paper texture panel it's free you go to russell brown dot com and I think russell is our u s s e l l see I don't like forget a nasser figure nell, but russell brown dot com when you get to his website, there'll be three choices. The choice on the right is his scripts and just scroll down a bit until you see the one that mentions texture it's free, it has its own installer and once you've installed it you go to the window menu, you'd use extensions and then you will find it there. I also know that once you install it, you will need to restart photoshopped not your computer just photoshopped quit photo shop started back up and, uh, it could do that now what if you like this panel because it speeds up your work a lot, but you don't feel like using flypaper textures well, this panel has a side menu if you go to the upper right corner of it and in there there's a choice of load texture folder if I choose that it will bring me to my hard drive where I could come in and see if I can find ah ah folder full of textures there might be too many in here though uh and if I hit open it's going to re populate this panel with the textures that I'm feeding it from whatever folder it is so this is a folder of the actual flypaper textures you can purchase on their website I think each pack is around forty bucks on and you can do this but you don't have to use theirs you can end up shooting your own and still use this panel just know that the panel does not work great with hundreds of textures eso limit yourself to dozens instead and then this could be a really nice way of just coming in here clicking with one click I could get the texture applied if I don't like it just click again in try out all sorts of textures that wasn't that nice of rustled uh come up with a script for us all right? So when I open it it shows up his little icon on the side here if I just click the icon it'll disappear and click it again it'll show up so that's nice and later on today, I think it will be possibly. Tomorrow. We'll give away a a pack of flypaper textures as well. I just like that. They ended up helping out with that, uh, so I figured I'd be nice to let people know about it.