Photoshop Tutorial: How to Isolate Textures in an Image

In my Photoshop texture tutorial" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/41443/photoshop_tutorial_how_to_apply_textures.html">other Photoshop texture tutorial, you learned the basics of adding textures to photos. However, that is nowhere near everything you need to know about textures. One technique is known as isolating a texture in an image, or just adding it to one part of the photo. This is important to know because it's rare that a texture looks good when applied to an entire photo. So in this Photoshop tutorial, you will learn just how to isolate textures in any photo.

The first step is to find a photo and texture to work with. You may have images of your own, or you may have to find photos on a stock site. Some great stock sites to use are www.sxc.hu, deviantart.com, and istockphoto.com. For this tutorial, I used a portrait and a dead leaf texture. You can choose any image you like. Portraits, landscapes, sports scenes, etc will all work great for this. If you are unsure of what a texture is, try searching for the world "texture" at any of these stock sites. Be creative, this tutorial will work with any picture or any texture.

Also, if you need to get Photoshop, download the free 30-day trial at www.adobe.com.

Once you have picked out your photos, open up Photoshop and be prepared to learn how to isolate textures in a photo.

1) Open up Photoshop and then open up both the picture and the texture as their own canvases.

2) Now you need to apply the texture to the image. Select the entire image/texture by choosing the marquee tool and going around the entire image. Then click Edit>Copy and then select the other image and paste it on by going to Edit>Paste. Right now the texture just looks like a photo on top of another.

3) To really apply the texture, you must make the texture more "transparent." Do this by going to the layer tab on the free-floating menu. On the drop down menu on the free-floating menu, change the mode to "Soft Light." This will automatically give you a texture effect.