FOR THE LOVE OF TEXTURES

I admit that I have become a photographer that absolutely loves using textures to enhance my portraits. My absolute favorites sets come from these amazing women: Shana Rae of Florabella Photography, Colleen of Chasing Dreams Photography and Jessica, from Jessica Drossin Photography. I must say I haven't a clue how they do it, but I know it takes lots of time and talent to sit down and create "art" that will look unique and give photographs that wow factor that in some cases often represents a painted canvas.

With some creative vision and persistence, using textures can actually help salvage certain photographs. For example in this portrait of my beautiful model Macy, I purposely over processed and over-exposed the RAW file in photoshop. Of course there were several steps I took in the before photo to get it that way, but for the purpose of this tutorial I am going to stick to why I did it.

I changed the colors in the backround using some selective coloring, curves to give it a warmer glow. Now Macy's skin is flawless and her color on the pale side so I could have used just a warm filter that would have done the trick, but for me it just didn't have enough depth nor the right hue I wanted for this image. By adding Chasing Dream's "Sun" Texture in an overlay blending mode I was able to create a nice warm hue and even cast a natural shadow effect on her arms. It also warmed up the entire photo and made it more eye appealing to me.

I don't like to erase or mask out the textures on the face and hands so I usually grab my lasso tool and select the areas around her, go to Select>Modify>Feather (setting the feather radius between 10-20) and then with the marching ants still visible, select Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur (I like the radius set at 98) hit okay and this removes the marching ants.

The result is a lovely portrait that maintains the color of the texture without the textured effects, in other words if the brushes are a netted look, grunge or other design element it won't be apparent in the final image.

Not bad huh? Plus in this particular image I really didn't need to do any skin tone adjustments as this texture worked perfectly!!!

Please feel free to try this and just have fun.