Adding Textures Globally.

We’re now going to take a closer look at how to add a simple texture globally (affects the entire image).

In the video examples I’ve photographed an old A4 envelope and used it as my texture (a scanner would also do the job).

Experimenting and playing around with your own textures will give your work an individual style others will find hard to imitate.

To Colour or not to Colour your image?

Textures can add colour to your image unless you desaturate them.

If you have worked hard on getting your colours right in an image you will probably prefer to desaturate your texture before adding it to your image.

Another point to note is that good contrast between the blacks and whites will show up better; if your texture looks quite washed out and flat when you desaturate it, play around with a levels or contrast adjustment layer then either save as a jpeg and give your texture a name or create a visible stamp layer and drag that over to your image.

Blend Mode & Opacity

When you add a texture layer it will have a Normal blend mode set at 100% Opacity. The texture will completely hide your image with this setting.

So you will need to cycle through the blend modes to see how the texture interacts with your image.

You will also need to reduce the opacity of your texture layer so you can see your image underneath.

Experiment.

Try adding a saturated texture to your image and see how it also affects the colours.

Now we’ve played around with adding a texture over an entire image (globally), part three will cover using layer masks to apply/remove texture in specific areas (locally).