Transcripts
1. Introduction to Using Textures in Photoshop: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Using Textures in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this class, we're looking at a range of ways that you can use textures in Photoshop. We'll use them for coloring line art, texturing original art, filling text, and altering the mode of a photo. I'll also introduce you to a little known free extension that you can use in Photoshop to add textures to an image with a single click. You'll learn about textures that are shipped with Photoshop. Now I designed this class to introduce you to some of the possibilities for using textures in ways that you may not have thought of doing. I'll also introduce you to a couple of my favorite places to find texture images and show you how you can easily source and make your own. By the time you've completed this course, you'll have enhanced your.
2. Where to Find Texture Images: A sensible starting point, it seems to me for a class on textures, is to show you a couple of my favorite places for finding texture images. Now some of the videos in this class are going to involve textures that are actually included with Photoshop, or which you can get from an extension that you can load into Photoshop. But apart from those, you may also want to find textures of your own. These are the places that I source my textures from. Now, the textures I'm using in this class are pretty much all from Skeletalmess. This is the Flickr stream of a person by the name Skeletal Mess. He has just amazing textures, and they're free to download and use, and they're full-size textures. So I'm going to give you this link and you can just come in here too, for example, texture of the day. Just click on this and you'll be able to see all the textures of the day that he provided. This was many years ago that he started providing them this way. So you can just come down and say, "Okay, this is the texture that I want", well, let's actually go and get one of my favorites, which is this one here. So you'll just click on it to select it and it's going to open up in a new window. When it opens up in this new window down here, you're going to see the download link. You can click on this download link and then you can choose the sizes. So you probably want original size, because they are slightly small textures in this day and age. But they asked some awesome textures and I think you'll love his Flickr stream. Now the other place to go is UnSplash.com. UnSplash.com is a site where you can download photos to use in your art, and it's just a treasure trove. When you come to UnSplash.com, just type in the word texture and you'll get access to all of those textures. There are some amazing images here that you're just going to love. So that's another source for textures. Now the third possible source is you. It's you and your camera. Now that might be a camera on your phone. It might be a point and shoot or it might be a DSLR. What I do, when I'm out and about, is I'm always looking for texture images.So I'm just going to step you through a range of mine and just explain how they were shot. Now, these are all from an old point and shoot. These are jellies or sweets from probably at show. I find the county show is a really good place to get some really good images. So I have a couple of those nice ones with some water texture, lovely, lovely images to use. Obviously, look down as you're walking around, because on the street surface you're going to find lots of textural elements. This I think was a great in the road, really beautiful colors in this texture, as well as some interesting sort of textural elements in this grid. Trees, tree bark is a good source of texture. Again, this is from a fair, I've probably grab the colors from this image when I'm making a texture from it. Fences, painted fences that have got paint scraped off them. This is something metal because it's rusting, but it's got really deep scratches and really love this texture. These are just lays on the ground in autumn. I think this is paper, but I really don't know. I really don't remember. Maybe it's mess of paint on the floor or something but really nice texture. This is a lamp post that I saw as I was walking past, has got bits of sticky tape on it. This is a piece of rock, again, interesting textural elements. Just have your wits about you as you're walking around. If you see something that's an interesting texture, just take a photograph of it, and then build your own collection of textures, that you can use for your own purposes.
3. Install and use the Paper Textures Extension: In Photoshop CC 2015, a new feature was offered, and it's a Paper Texture Extension and you can get to it by choosing Window and then Extensions. If it's installed, it's going to appear as Adobe Paper Texture Pro. Now, if it's not installed on your machine, you can install it. The lucky thing about it is that, once you've got it installed, it seems to roll over into lighter versions, but it's just as a bit of a pain to install. So to do that, you're going to choose Find extensions on exchange, and that will take you to Adobe exchange. Here you're going to log in if you're asked to log in and you're going to click here in the Search area and type Paper texture, and click to search. What you want is this Adobe Paper Texture Pro. So you'll click on it to select it. It's phrased, so you'll click on it to acquire the extension, and once it's acquired, this is what the screen's going to look like. Now, they tell you to make sure that you've got the Creative Cloud Desktop App installed version 4.6 or later. I haven't had a lot of success even finding it there, much less, working out how to install it. You could also click here to Download or Install it another way, but that's not functioning when I went there today. The way that I've found works reasonably well is to click on View my exchange. Then you will see the Textures' Extension here. If you click to Sync Extensions, chances are that it will be installed on your computer. What you would do is go into Photoshop and close Photoshop and reopen it. If that doesn't work, I suggest you just do the thing all over again and just come back in here. Perhaps click Uninstall and then Install and see if you can make it work. I've had success with just persevering past the initial annoyance and installing it. As I said, once it's installed, it tends to stay there, which is the good thing and the reason why it's worth persevering trying to get it installed. I'm going to choose Window and then Extensions. Let's see what it is that we're even talking about. I'm choosing Adobe Paper Texture Pro. This is just a very simple extension and what it does as you need to select your Blend Mode. Since I have an image already open here, I'm going to choose Overlay. If I didn't have an image open, if I just had a white background, then I would probably choose Normal because you want to be able to see your textures as you're applying them. There are a whole heap of textures here, and to add one to the image, all you do is just click on it. It's automatically added to the image and it's blended in using a Blend Mode that you chose, which was Overlay. Now you can change that to another Blend Mode, but if you want to do that, you have to click to remove it and then click to re-add it. But of course, this texture is being added to the image using just regular Photoshop layers. If we go to the last pallet, we'll see the texture that's just being added. If you want to very quickly, and easily change your Blend Mode, then I suggest you just come in here and change the Blend Mode for the layer. Let's go back to overlay. You can add multiple textures by just clicking on another texture to add it to the document. You can see stacking these textures on top of each other as long as you like. You can also use this Brainstorm option to add random textures. Now before I do that, I'm just going to get rid of the existing textures by just clicking on them and everyone I click on is automatically removed. So I'm going to ask for two textures. I'll ask to randomize the Blend Mode since I've got an image here. So I'll just click to create a random condemnation. From there, I could just come and make changes to the Blend Mode or I could simply remove the texture by just clicking on the one I want to remove and try something else. If you want to remove all your textures, you just click here to Remove all Textures. Now if you really like this tool, you can get more textures. But I think there are for free textures, the ones that we have here are free textures. But it is an indication as to how extensions can simplify the work in Photoshop. It is a cute little extension, I quite like and I'm not sure why it rated so low on the Exchange Website. But maybe people just struggled with actually installing it in the first place. There's a handy little tool if you're using Photoshop CC 2015 or latter, you have access to it, and as I said, once it's installed, it tends to stick around, which is the nice thing about the struggle that you might have to install it in the first place.
4. Textures applied using Styles: There are some textural elements that are hidden inside styles in Photoshop. I have an image from unsplash.com I open here, I'm going to click on the lock icon just to release that last. It's no longer a background layer, I can apply a style to it. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you might need to double-click on that layer and then click "Okay" to do just that. Now with the layer selected, I'm going to the fx icon, and I'm going to choose pattern overlay. Here I can apply a pattern to the image. Now I've already got some patterns located here in my pattern catalog. If you don't have any texture patterns, you can click on the gear icon, and there are textures that you can use here, for example, papers and rock patterns, and texture fills, a whole lot of options that you have that are shipped with Photoshop, including even artist surfaces. Let's go and append the artist's surfaces collection. You can just click on a particular pattern here to add it to the image. If you want to see it at full intensity, you probably want to set it to something like multiply blend mode. You'll see that this has got a distinct repeat in it. But if we bring the opacity down quite a bit, and if increase the scale quite a bit, and then choose a different blend mode, for example something like overlay, then we can add some subtle texture to image. I'm going to bring the opacity down even lower to maybe two or three and click "Okay." If I zoom into the image, you'll see that there is a little bit of texture in it, just enough to give it some visual interest. You can test to see what it looks like before and after by just clicking on the effects option. If you want to edit it, just click on patent overlap and that reopens the dialogue. You could choose another type of pattern should you wish to do so, or adjust the settings for the one that you already have in place. That's an easy and built-in way to add some texture to your images in Photoshop.
5. Color Line Art with Texture: One use for textures that you may not have considered is in coloring line art. I've got line art here that has a solid line around it, but it does have a white background. So I am going to start by selecting the magic one to make sure that contiguous is not enabled. I'll set my tolerance up pretty high because this is a pretty clean document and click once on the background and press delete, So that's deleted the background allowing me to bring in a texture that I can use to color this avocado. I have a texture here, it's obviously in the wrong orientation, so choose Image and then Image rotation. I'm going to rotate this counterclockwise to put this color at the top. Now I also want to make sure that it's going to be big enough for the image that it's going onto. This image here has a height of 2,579 pixels. Let's go and resize this image to match. I'll choose Image and then Image Size. If I go now to Window and select my avocado image, the dimensions of this particular image are going to change and it's going to be sized to fit that document. Now this image has been slightly squashed up, since it's a texture, I'm fine with that. I'll just click Okay. Let's take it to the avocado image. If I hadn't wanted it to be squashed up I could take it with me and resize when I get there in proportion. This image is the same size as the avocado, so if I hold the Shift key, it's going to drop in immediately over the top of the avocado line art. I'm going to move it behind. I'm going to fill the outside of the avocado, the sort of green bit. So I'll go to the Magic Wand Tool again. This time, I will select contiguous, I'll go to my line art layer and click to select this inner area. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger by choosing Select and then Modify and I'll choose Expand. We're going to expand that about five pixels. That will mean in a minute that the selection is going to tuck in under the black line work. I'll go to this layer, and what I want to do is to make a copy of that portion of the layer that is the shape of this avocado. I'll choose Layer, New, Layer via Copy and that gives me this portion of the texture on a separate layer. I'm going to do the same with the pitting the avocado, make a selection, enlarge it slightly, go and select the texture filled layer and choose Layer, New, Layer via Copy. I'm going to re-color this layer, the avocado area, the sort of fruit area which would typically be green. I'll use a hue saturation layer and I'll do it as an adjustment last I'll choose Layer, New adjustment Layer, hue saturation. I'm going to walk the hue slider around until I pick up the green color that I want, but you can see that this is affecting the entire image, I'm going to click here to limit that change to that portion of the image that we're actually working on. I'm looking for my sort of green color here. I can increase the saturation and I could make it a little bit darker or a little bit lighter, but I do just want to say that sort of green color coming through. We'll do the same thing with the pip, Layer, New adjustment layer and then hue saturation. This time we'll look for a dark orange color. Make sure that I'm using the Clipping option. Once I get there, I'm going to increase the saturation and in this case just decrease the lightness. I can also make changes to the actual texture itself underneath. Again, I would add an adjustment layer. They're nice to use when you can because they do allow you that ability to edit them later on, if you decide that you want to change your colors a little bit. I'm thinking I might hype the color up on this, a little bit, but maybe bring down the saturation. Having done this texturizing of the line art, it's also possible to add some shading. I have a class on this, so I'm going to post a link in the description so that you can say that class if you're interested in it. What I'm doing is going to the Burn tool, which is a darkening tool, I've got a fairly soft brush for this and you want to a soft brush. I'm aiming for the mid tones because that's what these colors are in the Midtown area, I have a very low exposure, which you'll want to do. I've got the layer with this texture on it selected, and now I'm just burning in the edges. I'm just darkening the edges. I took the exposure up to 25 percent, which is horribly large, so that you can say the affect, you wouldn't want to make it anywhere near this intense. We can add some shadowing To the shapes, and we could do that also to the texture that is, they Pip in the avocado. If you want to lighten things, you're going to the dodge tool and that's the lightning tool. Again, you'll probably want to be working on mid tones, and again, a fairly low exposure, somewhere between 5-10 percent is usually plenty for exposure. I can paint over this to lighten some areas and build in a little bit of contrast into this texture effect.
6. Using Photos as Textures for Photos: There's no rule that says that you can't use photos as textures. When I'm combining photos and using one as a texture or some element with another photo. I'm looking for two photos that of sit well together. These are actually both by the same photographer and they're from unsplash.com. I think they're probably both New York shots. This one of course is the bridge. What I'm going to do is combine these two photos because I really like some of the colors in here and the light, and I love this bridge photo. Now they are shot by the same photographer. Not surprisingly, they're both the same size image. I'm going to take the background of this one and drop it in on top of the bridge. I'll hold the Shift key as I do this, so that the second image is centered immediately over the top of the first. To blend these images in, we would just choose a blend mode. Now, I'm going to paste it, which means that I can run down these blend modes using the up and down arrow key. If you're on a Mac, that doesn't work. What you want to do is select something like the rectangular Marquee tool. It has to be a tool. It's not a brush tool. This ones typically the easiest to select. Then you'll go and select the different blend mode. As soon as you've done that on the Mac, you can use Shift plus and Shift minus to move through the blend modes. But since I'm on a PC, I'm just going to use my down-arrow key. What I'm looking for is something. I'm just going to move through these blend modes and see if anything is going to give me something that would work. Now on a PC, as soon as you get to the last one, you have to come back up, it doesn't scroll around. On the Mac, it does scroll round. Now that I've taken my first trip through, I know that there are a couple that are of interest to me. I'm really liking this one. It's soft light and the two images are blending pretty well together there I quite like that. Overlay is one of those go to blend modes. I think it's probably a little bit too intense here. Lighted color, also interesting. As this screen, the screen is a lightening blend mode to so you can expect to see some value in that. Lighten is also pretty good. But I think for this one I'm going for soft live. Now there are a couple of things that I could do having arrived at something that I like. I really like the buildings on the bridge, the texture coming in from the other photo. Well, one of the options I would have is to actually isolate these to the bridge. I'm going to bridge layer, I'm going to the quick selection tool. I'm just going to make a really quick selection over the bridge. I want it to be pretty rough and ready. Then I'll come back up to the original photo layer and I'll add my mask. Now, if I decrease the opacity on that top layer, I'm getting some colors in the bridge, but I've got more like the original bridge image just with some added layer of color. Now, there's another option which I like. That is to again use this soft light blend mode, but I'm going to make this more fuzzy. I'm going to convert this layer into a smart object. Just right-click on it and converts smart object. That means I can get it back later on and the blow that I'm about to apply to it will also be removable. I'll go to filter blur and I'm just going to use a Gaussian Blur. Gaussian Blur is a blur that blurs everything. I want a fairly hefty blur here. I'm taking it up to about probably 20-30, something like that. Just a really decent blur and I'll click "Okay." Now I can dial down the opacity if I wish to do so. I think that's another interesting effect. You can say that we've lost a lot of the definition in the photograph that we're using as a texture for the bridge. But it has added a bit of color into the background. It is a little bit of a more interesting image for combining those two photos. Now I've got another set of photos that I shot. There's some autumn leaves on a wall and there's also some lights that I shot the Neon Museum in Las Vegas many years ago. I'm going to take the neon image and drop it in on top of this other image. Now they're shot with different cameras. I need to just enlarge the neon image to cover up the image below. Now again, I'm going to do this trip round with the blend mode. You're always using the blend mode on the topmost layer doesn't have any effect on the bottom most layer. I'm just looking at what I'm finding. First trip is just an experiment. I got as far as this one, which is hue and really liked this effect. The laser picking up the color from the neon image. Because the rest of the lays image is pretty much white and gray, none of that pain colored rest really the leaves. That's what the hue blend mode does, is it takes the hue on this layer and applies it to the layer below. Well, I like that effect, but I've lost all my lights. What I'm going to do is actually duplicate this. I'm going to try another set of blend modes on the top layer. Then you can do that. You can stack photos and you can stack textures. Here we're just using a light image, this neon light image as a texture for our photo. Again, I'm just going down to seeing what I can get. The disappointing blend modes are always going to be for the difference and exclusion, subtract and divide the very seldom getting mileage out of them. They are pretty specific use for those. But I did really like linear burn. I just thought it was too much of an effect. What I'm going to do is dial down the opacity on that layer to absolutely zero. I'm using this grubby slider. In Photoshop, you don't have to drop this little panel down and work on this slide here, you can just scrub over the words. Just hold the mouse button and if you scrub over the word, it adjusts the slider. What I'm looking for is just the sweet spot here, really. Where am I starting to pick up some interest in the color, but not quite the intensity of that linear burn blend mode. Well, I'm liking this, so I'm pretty happy with that at this stage. But there is another thing that I did play around with and I wanted to show you. Having done this blending effect and using a photo as a texture for another photo. Let's throw a hue saturation adjustment on top of all of this. I'm going to choose new adjustment layer and then hue saturation. Because we've got some really interesting colors in this image. It's purple, it's pale blue, it's green, it's pink. These are all quite pastel colors. Let's see what happens if we start adjusting the hues and the image. While some really interesting things happen. We're just doing a blanket hue adjustments. What we're doing is pulling all the colors evenly around the color wheel. Because things start out being green, they're going to end up in a different place than something that started out being blue. But there's a lot of pastel colors in here and a lot of interesting things that you can do with pastel colors. Somewhere in there you might find an interesting effect where you're taking the base image and playing with the colors in it. When I'm looking for is something that's still going to give me the detail in these leaves, but perhaps something a little bit more interesting in terms of color. I like that. I would probably come in and just adjust down they opacity on this top layer to just lighten it a little bit. But you can see that by stacking photographs. Photographs that lend themselves to being together. You want to think in terms of, "Okay, I had this bridge photo. What can I find that would go with this bridge photo. What got something of interest in it?" Here with this ivy, well, let's try something completely different, but that is also complimentary to it. It's got some interesting architectural details. This image of the ivy had some interesting architectural details. There's obviously some very distinct lines in the fence, for example. So just combining those gives a very different result.
7. Change the Mood in an image with a texture: For this next example, I'm going to show you how you can use a texture to change the mood of an image. This image is fairly light. There are mainly light tones through it, a little bit of dark in the background, a little bit dark in these flowers, but the overwhelming feeling is of a relatively light image. Well, I've got a texture here that is interesting. I found it on skeletal mass. I'm going to give you the link to his Flickr stream, and he is somebody who collects up a lot of textural images. There are quite a few of his that have this dark border around them. Very interesting and I think it's going to be interesting to use it. I need to change its rotation though because it needs to fit over that other image, so I'll choose image and then image rotation and just rotate it 90 degrees. It doesn't matter too much to me whether I am going clockwise or counterclockwise, it's just a matter of where you might see some elements that you want to be higher up in the image rather than low. Now I'm going to make it the same size as this other image, so I'll choose image and then image size, and then I'll choose window, and then the image that I want to match it too. Now both these images are going to be the same size. I'll click okay and then I'll take this image with me to the other image. Hold the Shift key as I drop it on top. There are obviously some dark areas to this image but the middle of it is not particularly dark. That said, we are going to find it's going to change the mood of the underlying image as we roll down these blend modes. Darken is one of those interesting blend modes that can be of some value but multiply is usually the one that you choose out of the darkening blended group. There's a group here, these are all darkening ones, these are all lightening ones, these are the contrast group, these are the weirdly inverting group, and then some specialists ones at the bottom. But if you're looking at darken and it's always worthwhile having a look at multiply as well because you'll usually get really good results from multiply. It's just the way that it works is a little bit different too darken. Linear Burn is doing very well here too, I'm really liking the boast of color but generally the darkening of the image. Then we're into the lightening blend modes. The lighten and screen and Color Dodge, not much action there. Overlay, interesting if we were looking for a boasting contrast but it's just killed these roses in the foreground and it's really not helping here at all. Soft light a little bit better. But none of them really giving us that mood change that I came here looking for. I think I'm going to find that the value in these darkening blend modes and in particular perhaps in multiply. We haven't lost the texture in the roses, which is really nice and we have got a darkening effect around the image. When one multiply blend mode is really nice, you may want to step out of your comfort zone and double up on it. I'm just going to duplicate this layer. But this time I want to pull it out a little bit so I'm not getting the extra darkening around the edge. I'm going to hold the Alt key on a page, say that would be option on the Mac and just enlarge this some more. Now if you're working in an older version of Photoshop, you'll have to throw the Shift key in there as well. But in the most recent versions of Photoshop, you don't need to use the Shift key because the proportional resizing is built in. Now I like that, I think I could probably do something a little bit similar here and just try and remove some of those dark areas out of this image but keep some of them. We've now changed the overall mood of this image from Brighton light to something a lot darker, a lot moodier. Now you could also do something about the yellowy cast in the image because both of these texture layers that we're using are predominantly yellow. They're throwing a slightly yellow cast. Well we could adjust the coloring in one of these layers. I am going to do it directly on the layer, will choose image adjustments and I'm going to hue saturation because that's a nice, quick and easy way to put some other color into the image, and you can watch down here and say the color that's going in, it won't necessarily always match the color on the color wheel because you started with yellow, you didn't start with blue. So everything sort of being added to everything else. And so it's hard to look at a color here and say that's the color I'm dropping in because that simply not the case. But what I am looking for is a sort of pink and here is the pink area. I could lighten this a little bit if I wanted to but probably just adjusting one of those textures to be slightly pinker has removed that yellowy color cast from the image. But it's certainly a much moodier more intense image than it was previously. If you really wanted to up the ante on this, then you probably add a Curves adjustment layer that will allow you to enhance the contrast in the image. This is the light side of the curves and this is the dark side of the curves, and you can see that all the pixels in this image is from the mid tones to the darker area. That's not surprising, that's what we came here to do. But I can keep the darks down a little bit and then lighten the lights a little bit to add this little boast of contrast through the mid tones. Where this curve is steeper, that's additional contrast, and so the steepness in the curve between these two points is in this mid tone area. This is what it was like before and this is what it's like with this Curves adjustment. The Curves adjustment is really hitting it with a bit of contrast, and it's bringing these flowers in particular to life in the image. I really like that effect. There is a method for using one of these interesting textures that has this edge on it, this darkening edge, and using that and the inner part of the texture, which of course is not white, and so it's adding some color and some effect to the image that's placed over just to completely change the mood of the image. This is the original image that I downloaded from unsplash.com. and this is the image that we've managed to craft this much moodier more intense image as a result of applying a Curves adjustment layer, a little bit of a hue adjustment and of course these two texture layers.
8. Fill Text with a Texture: Another potential use for a texture is in filling in some text to give the text a little bit more of a visual interest. Here I have an image that just has a blue background and it has some text on it. Now I've chosen a font that is all capitals and want it to be boxy because it lends itself to this effect, particularly the fact that it's all capitals because all the letters are the same height. I'm going to use one of these textures that has this outer darkened edge. I'm just going to drag and drop it into my text image holding the shift key to just drop it over the top. Now it's much bigger than my text, so I'm going to press CTRL+T, and then CTRL+0. Now on the Mac that would be Command+T, Command+0. That just sizes the image so that we can see its handles. What I'm going to do is just bring it in so it's a little bit closer to the size of the text that I want to fill with this texture. Now you can do that. If you put your texture on the layer above the text that you want to fill with it, you just create a clipping mask. So we have the texture layer selected, we'll choose ''Layer'', and then ''Create Clipping Mask''. That effectively fills the text with the texture. So whatever that's on this layer is going to appear in the place of the color of the text. If the text were black, it wouldn't matter, if it were red, it wouldn't matter, because the color of the text is being sacrificed in this process. It's no longer white text, instead we're seeing the texture on the layer above. What I'm going to do is just bring that top slightly darker area of that texture into the top of my text. To say what this looked like before and after, this is the original text, very bright white on the blue background, and this is the text with the texture behind it. The way that I've applied it is to try and get some of this dark area over the top of the letters. If you didn't want that, then you could just move that texture, just select the texture layer and just move it somewhere else. Now there's also some color along the edge of this texture, the other edges. I could also rotate it around and see if I could find some additional color, perhaps from these areas. You can manipulate your texture a little bit and just arrange it, and because it's on a separate layer to the text itself, it's not going to have any effect on the text. It's not moving the text, it's on the moving that texture.
9. Distress a Drawing Using a Texture: Textures are a really handy tool to add some visual interest to your custom drawings and we're going to use it to poke holes in a shape that we're going to create in this document. I'm going to start by filling the background of this document. I'm choosing layer, new fill layer, and then solid color. The reason why I do this is it's going to be easier for me to change the color later on if I want to tweak it using this tool. So that's layer, new fill layer, and then solid color. So I've got a solid color layer there. Now I'm going to choose the custom shapes tool, and I have a shape already selected here. From the options up here in the top corner, I'm going to choose either shape or pixels. Just don't choose path because we actually want some color here and I'm choosing for my fill for this shape, this blue color. I can now drag to add my cat-shaped to the document, I'm going to add the Shift key so that it's constrained in its original proportions. Now if you're using a more recent version of Photoshop, you probably already know that the Shift key has changed its behavior in terms of sizing things and you don't add it when you want to resize something in proportion. However, if you're using a shape and dragging a shape into a document, if you want to constrain it to its original proportions, you will want to be holding down the Shift key as you draw that shape. Now I've got my shape over a background and what I want to do is to texturize this by poking holes in the cat so that I can say the background throw him. Now they texture that I've chosen to use for this process is this one here. The reason why I've chosen it is because there's a lot of texture here that I could use to poke holes in the cat, namely these black areas, they're going to be of the most value to me and not the white areas. So what I want to do is to get rid of the white areas and just leave the black spider web texture and I'll probably be able to even whittle that down a little bit narrower so it doesn't even look quite the way it does right now. I'm going to unlock this layer by just clicking on the lock icon. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you might need to double-click on the layer to do that. Because I want the black and I don't want the white, it would be hard for me to actually invert the color in this image. So what I'm going to do is choose image adjustments and choose invert. So now we're looking at the white that I actually want and not the black that I don't want. To select the black looks like it's going to be a bit of a difficult process, but it's actually relatively easy. What I'll do with this layer selected here is choose, select, and then color range. In the color range option here, I want to select the shadows. So I want to select the dark areas of this image, and so that I can see what I'm selecting, I'm going to choose from the selection preview, drop-down list, Quick Mask and that adds a Ruby overlay over the image and the bits that I can still see are the bits that are actually going to be left behind when I delete the areas that are covered in red, and you can adjust this. So you could adjust the fuzziness and you can see that it's going to leave much more of this texture behind. I don't want so much, so I'm going to adjust the fuzziness up. The range is also going to determine how much of the image is removed, which is going to be the red area, and left behind, which is going to be the area that I can still see. You can also see it in this dialogue here. But I think for this kind of image in particular, I find it much easier to have this Ruby overlay over the image because it just makes it really clear to me what I'm going to be left with. So let's just make sure that we're going to still have quite a bit of texture left behind. I think that's pretty good. I'll click, Okay. Now we have a selection of all the areas that I want to remove, so I'll just press the Delete key and they're removed. Then I'll select my selection with select, deselect, or you could press Control or Command-D. So this is the texture image that we're going to use, so what I'll do is just grab this layer and take it to my image and just drop it in to position. I'm holding the Shift key as I do that, so it jumps right into the middle of the document. Now I can also squeeze this up. In this case, I will hold the Shift key down because I want to distort this texture a little bit. So far, so good, the texture is looking pretty good. It's just, it's not poking a hole in the image at this point. What I want to do having gotten into this image and sized it, is to copy it. I'm going to Control click on the layer here and I'm going to copy it with Edit copy. Then I'll turn this layer off because I don't actually want the texture on a layer. What I wanted to do is to mask out the cat shape. So I'm going to the cat shape here and I'll click here on Add Layer Mask. What that does is it paste in the texture the wrong way round, which was just fine because we know how to invert textures, we'll choose Image Adjustments and then Invert, and that inverts the texture. Now the texture is operating to poke holes in the cat. Now if I decide that it's a little bit too much, what I could do is deselect this option here, which is linking the cat and the texture. This allows me to adjust the texture and I'm thinking that I could either rotate it around a little bit, either 90 degrees, so it's running a little bit horizontal or go round 180 degrees. I think this is a better result. So the texture is being used as I mask here on the cat shape. Now I can easily change my background color should I wish to do so by double-clicking on this layer. Now I can just drag around to find a color that I want to use. So at this point I'm selecting different tones and shades over red, but I can also adjust the base color and choose something different. So by selecting an appropriate texture image and extracting the bits that you want from it, you're able to create a mask that will allow you to add some texture to a hand drawn graphic. In this case, this is the texture that I chose to use. It had elements that I thought I could use in this image to add this distressed look to it.
10. Make Your Own Complex Textures: Now, in addition to simply taking photographs of textures yourself, what you can do is you can put multiple photographs of textures together to create a more interesting texture. We're going to do that with a few of my images here, but you could easily do it with some that you've downloaded from unsplash.com. I want the textures to be in landscape orientation. I'm going to start by rotating this image. This is one of the images I want to use because I really like the colors in this image. But this is also one of my favorite site, so I'm going to use it too. What I'm looking for when I'm combining these images into a more complex texture is, things that bring color and things that bring actual texture with them. These two, I think are going to be a good combination. I'll drag the background layer over into this image, hold the Shift key so that they're layered on top of each other. Now, I'm just going to travel down the blend modes and see what I can get. I'm just taking notes as I go down of some of the blend modes and some of the results that I'm getting, and ones that potentially I might like. This lightened blend mode working really nicely here, that's a nice little textured result. Interesting lighter color. I'm liking the blue elements coming through there. This is hard light, again, some purple elements coming through here, that's a nice blend mode. This is different, and this is one that I really do like for getting a real color punch. What happened is that part of this image has inverted, and so we're getting this inverted image over the top of the original red texture. Let's keep going. Obviously we're going all the way down to the end on the PC on the Mac, or if you're using that Shift+ or Shift-, you can roll all the way around and start back again. On the PC, we're going to have to go back manually, but this is the last one, it's luminosity. I'm going to take the different one because this is often a difficult blend mode to use because of what it does to images. But I'm really liking the punch of color coming through here. I think this could use a third textures, this texture which I still have not convinced that I know what it is. But let's just drag and drop it into our working image. Again, making sure that I hold the Shift key as I drop it in. Again, I'm going down the blend modes just to see what's happening. In some of these blend modes, we're just picking out the darker elements from that texture, these splashes of color. Using other blend modes without saying much of these two layers at all it's pretty much all the topmost layer because it's a lightened blend mode and this texture was the lighter of all of those layers. This is Color Dodge, really interesting, really bright colors, really, really liking that particular texture. This is Vivid Light. Vivid Light giving again, a real color punch here. This is Divide, again, lots of color in this texture. It really depends on what you're looking for in your texture result as to which of these blend modes you are going to use. Remember too, that even if you find a result that you like, you can always adjust the opacity of these layers to just get a different effect. You can drop down the opacity of a layer to remove some of the effect, and that goes for this layer too. Well, that's really interesting. I'm going to call that good for today, but you can probably expect to get a couple of textures out of a combination like this. A couple of textures that potentially you could sell or give away on your blog. I'm liking this one too. That would be one that I would save. Experiment with putting multiple textures together to make another texture. Things that work really well too are things that have text in them, so if you can find a texture of all writing for example, or music, then you could drop that in and you'll get some interesting results using that. Just look for combinations that each image that you're bringing into the textures, is bringing something interesting with it, and try putting those together with blend modes and just see what you can come up with.
11. Project and wrapup: We've now completed the video portion of this course, so now it's over to you. Your project for this class will be to take one or more of the techniques that you learned in this class and apply them to an image of your choice. Post your completed work as your class project. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class and learned something from it, would you do two things. Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class. Secondly, complete that short survey that's going to appear on the screen telling us what you, in particular, liked about the class. Those recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, that means you haven't followed me yet, so click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
