If you’ve spent anytime at all exploring sites like Flickr, I’m sure you’ve notice a good many photographs that have a certain “vintage” look to them, a patina if you will. There are many variations to this theme, ranging from simple toning to full blown distressing of the photograph complete with film like grain or scratches and surface variation resembling an old or imperfect photo. Up till now you might have thought that achieving this look was difficult and time consuming, but in fact it is remarkably easy, and it is done using textures.
What exactly is a texture? The term texture when used in photoshop refers to an image that is used on top of your own image that when adjusted via blend modes or opacity imparts a “texture” on your image. The “texture” doesn’t have to be of a physical texture, in fact it could be nearly anything, including another photo. Generally however textures will be photographs or scans of old pieces of paper, fabric, a hand written letter, etc. But it could be a image of clouds, rain drops on a windshield, a bokeh pattern, bubbles, water reflections, and on and on. That’s the beauty of using textures, they could be anything and combined infinitely to create a wide range of different looks.
Of course this variation makes it seem a bit more confusing than it is, but to clear up any confusion I’ve provided a walk through on how to use a couple of textures that make a good photo into a very interesting photo. It’s easy to overdo textures, and I prefer to not stray to far from my original material, but you could take this is as far as you want with as many textures as you want.[...]
Tags: blend modes, bubbles, clouds, confusion, fabric, flickr, patina, photo, photograph, photographs, physical texture, rain drops, scratches, textures, variation, variations, water reflections, windshield
