Textures

I always love the way the addition of textures adds to a picture. Ever since I discovered the technique I've been fascinated with it. There are plenty of web sites where you can find free textures, probably just as many who will sell you some or you can make them yourself. Since I'm all about free and do it yourself, making them is right up my alley. I suppose I could just whip up a download and give you some of the ones I've done but instead I'm going to tell you how I went about making my most recent one.

I started by choosing some pictures.
First I opened up the grass picture I showed you the other day.

Then I went to file>place and chose my second picture

I changed the blending mode on this to hard light and turned the opacity down to about 80%. Then again I went to file>place and chose a third picture

This time I changed the blending mode to hue and left the opacity at 100%. I normally just keep scrolling through the different blending modes until I find something that looks good to me. It's not always the same ones but my favorites seem to be either soft light, overlay and multiply. As you can see this time I didn't use any of those but this is what looked the best this time around. You can also use an eraser to erase parts of a picture that may seem a bit too distracting or don't seem to fit well with the look your going for.

The next step was to merge the layers together. Now I could have left it as is but I chose to do one more thing which was to lower the saturation.  You can do that by either hitting cntrl+U on your keyboard or by using a hue/saturation adjustment layer. After all this there was nothing left to do but to save the file.

So lets test it out now and see how it looks on a photo. 

 I opened up this picture then went to file > place and located the texture I had just made. With the new texture as the second layer I changed it's blending mode to soft light and now the above picture looks like this.

And there you have it. Of course you could lower the opacity on the texture layer to give it a more subtle look. It all just depends on what you like. So go ahead and pull out some of those pictures you have that you don't think are good for anything and start playing around with them. You just might be surprised at what amazing textures you can come up with.

Discovery

I've never been one to watch the Discovery channel but I do love it when I make a discovery of my own. I found an amazing blog recently that I have to share with you. It's called Shadowhouse Creations.  The author of this blog is Jerry Jones, a self taught Photoshop digital artist. Let me tell you, his work is amazing. Aside from being very talented, he's also very generous. He offers textures, brushes and tutorials.

I picked up a couple of his textures the other day as well as a mask and did some playing around

 

This next one I used his mask and a texture. 

 

Of course my two example can't even compare to what you'll see on his blog but I had to show them.

Go on over and check it out. Shadowhouse Creations.

An answer and a surprise

There was a comment left on my last post that I want to address today. The comment was "I have a really stupid question and I hope you don't mind me asking, but what do you exactly do in scrapbooking? It does look interesting."
First of all, not a stupid question at all, and second, of course I don't mind you asking. Now to answer it I didn't know if I could explain it so that it would make sense so I went in search of an intelligent answer. You see sometimes, even though my brain knows the answer, when I put it into words it loses something on the journey from thought to text.
So, this is the definition that I found for scrapbooking:
Scrapbooking is a method for preserving personal and family history in the form of photographs, printed media, and memorabilia contained in decorated albums, or scrapbooks.

I also found an explanation of what digital scrapbooking is on Wise Geek

Now that you endured my feeble attempt at explaining scrapbooking I have a surprise for you. When I was doing my EC drops yesterday I saw an adorable make up bag on LovelyPurses The fabric it was made from had the cutest little trees on it and it inspired me to go make some of my own. I've included one layered template and 5 sample trees.
You can get them right HERE

Well back to work tomorrow, at least it's only a 4 day work week. Hope everyone is enjoying their Labor day weekend.

Plan on not making plans

You would think that at my age I would have learned by now that whenever I make plans for something they almost always fall through. Friday after my appointment I was going to take my camera to the dock and the beach and get some pictures. Well when I finished up with my appointment and went outside, it was raining. Just my luck. So, no trip to the dock or the beach. I headed home, which is roughly a 45 minute drive. Halfway home, the sun comes out and I discover that I don't have my prescription sun glasses with me anymore. That can mean only one thing, I somehow lost them at my first stop of the day, because I had them on when I went in (the sun was out then). Now not only did I NOT get the pictures I wanted to take but my mood has done a nose dive because I lost the glasses. I called the place where I had my appointment and asked if they had a lost and found. They did, told me they would look around for them and call me back if they located them. I haven't heard from them so I'm assuming they are gone for good now. Sometimes I could just kick myself.
The weather, from the time I got home till this post, has been beautiful. However, I lost my momentum Friday morning and haven't done anything I planned on.
What I did manage to do was play around with pse and make a couple things.
This was a picture of stones and shells that I took last summer. I took it on a plain white background. I extracted the shells and made a new background. I was going for something that looked like sand. This came pretty close. Not perfect but I got bored with it so I quit here


I made a few kaleidoscopes with Dazzling Reflections then opened them up in pse and made this.


Last but not least I did some minor adjustments on some pictures I took to use as textures. I put together a set of 9 different ones and was hoping that some of you might be able to use them.

You can download them HERE
So what's next? It's hard to say, but I can tell you that I'm planning on NOT planning anything....lol