November 14, 2009

Tutorial: Creating Your Own Custom Photo Textures!

Remember Emily's tutorial on adding texture to your photographs? Now that you've done that...how about making your own?

I started with the bag that my Studio Calico kit came in.
I punched a few stars and laid them on top of the bag.


I misted several layers and then removed the stars. For the purpose of this tutorial I was going easy and simple to show how quick it really could be--but you could mask, mist and layer to your heart's content!


I let it all dry for a bit.
I took a foil candy wrapper, crumpled and inked it up and then applied that to the bag.

I chose to crumple up my bag for some extra wrinkles and dents.


The next part was taking it outside and photographing it.
I took photos from several angles, making sure to fill the frame.


I also took some other 'textural' photos--the concrete walkway and the siding on the house.


I opened them all up in Photoshop and added them to the photo I wanted to texturize; blending, playing with layer opacity and masking out different portions of each of them to reach my final product.

Now...with a little Photoshop knowledge and an adventurous spirit--you're going to have a great start to your handmade texture collection. Combine your textures, add word art, desaturate them, try stitching, use different blending layers....add different types of texture (see Tina & Celine's ink & paint tutorials, Maggie& April's misting tutorials). In fact, many of the previous Studio Calico Tutorials could be helpful in creating your own textures! Your imagination is truly your only limitation.

A few hints/tips:
Keep your texture image at its largest size--so you're not limited to what size of photo you can use it with.
Start a texture folder (if you haven't already)--you'll be amazed how quickly you'll collect them!
In the beginning, take high quality photos with a deep depth of field (get it all in focus)...when you have a few like that, do the opposite (shallow dof) for effect.
Play with brightness/contrast and/or curves & levels in Photoshop to get different effects out of one photo.

Feel free to email me if you have questions or I can help you in any way. Most importantly, have fun!

15 comments:

Davinie Fiero said...

Seriously. YOU. ARE. Brilliant.

waleska said...

wow! Jenn, this is amazing!! thank you :)

lisa truesdell said...

this is AWESOME.

Natalie said...

Cant̕ wait to play with these great texture ideas! Thanks again

joanne (spagirl) said...

very. very. coooool!
thanks so much for sharing this!

Danielle Flanders said...

what?! that is so cool!!! now how did you add the textured background to your photo? i have ps2 and would appreciate any tips!
dflanders71@hotmail.com

thanks!!
danielle

Anonymous said...

Thank you! Your blog post will be advertised on the DigiFree Tutorials search engine today (look for timestamp: 14 Nov [LA 04:00pm, NY 07:00pm] - 15 Nov [UK 12:00am, OZ 11:00am] ).

Danielle Flanders said...

oops nevermind...just saw the link at the very beginning of the post when I re-read it.. ha
Thanks!

angie said...

i love that texture behind the baby! so when you have a texture, you just tag it to go in your (whatever) folder like you would any other photo? thanks for sharing!

Robin said...

So clever!

~Robin
http://robinredd.typepad.com/west_coast_scrapper/

Anna Sigga said...

That is such a beautiful texture - thanks for the fab tutorial!

Emily Pitts said...

jenn.

bunns.

just shaking my head here.

can't form the words.

cool.

Tina said...

wow, that's so cool Jenn! thanks..I'll have to give it a try sometime.

daizie said...

that is amazing!!!! what an awesome idea!!!! beautiful photo!!! not really sure i have the know how to DO this but, you sure make it look easy! LOL

Jessica Griffin said...

Oh that's AWESOME!! Gorgeous background, so soft and complimenting to the sweet baby!!