Adding a Bit of Texture
This month we are going to look at how you can easily add a little texture to your photographs, backgrounds or even your finished layouts. I have chosen a photo of my sister's cat to add a little texture to. Please make sure you are using a copy of whatever you are working with, as these tools do change the images pixels!
We shall be using the Burn Tool, one of my favorite and probably most used tool in Photoshop! You will have this tool on your Tool Bar Menu no matter what version of Photoshop you have.
The Burn and the Dodge Tool are used to either darken or lighten your image respectively. Both tools use the brushes loaded in your workspace, so you can choose literally thousands of textures.
Firstly, I added the photo edge as explained in last month's tutorial and copied/merged the edge and photo in one layer. Then I loaded the brush set I wished to use and selected a grungy cracked brush with the Burn Tool.
The settings for the Burn Tool are shown on the top menu bar. You can select Highlights, Midtones or Shadows to emphasize and then select the exposure or strength. I want to darken the shadow areas of the photo, whilst adding a little texture at the same time, so I selected Shadows with a strength of 72% to start with.
You can see the effect on the screenprint above. The texture shows more vividly on the darker areas of the photo and a pleasing cracked texture is appearing.
