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!