Tutorial Different ways to make textures and how to use them.

This is an image I have put together with different objects I have painted.

Open a canvas, put any object on it, you could very well use some stamp here for the exercise.

Choose another color than white or black for your color canvas. Do not merge your object on the background.

This is one of my texture, if you would like to use this one, right click and saved as on your computer.

First, we are going to apply some emboss to our background where we have our floating object.

Go under Effect, Choose Fill and Texture, then Texture Filters. The second effect is Emboss, this is the one we are going to use. Click on it. Next we are going to add our texture to our selections.

Click the down arrow and choose add texture, navigate where you have save your texture and click ok.

Now you are back to your emboss screen, I very rarely go more than a 100 for scaling, now play with the setting, until you find something that you like, I suggest that you don't make the emboss to deep here, you just want to get a fabric look.

Once you are done click ok.

This is the result for the emboss background using the texture filter Emboss.

Now you have your texture open in your workspace, make it active, click on copy, and paste over your image and send your layer to back. ( Note your texture tile as to be the same as your image canvas size). Right click on the texture you just have send to back and choose properties.

This is the setting I have used, merge mode is set to Hard Light and transparency set to 55. Once done click ok.

As you could see, it kind of fade the background and made it a bit softer at the same time.

Now we are going to paste our texture again over this image, but this time we will leave it on top of our image.

Another way to change how the merge is apply, open your layer manager, where it is written Always, click the down arrow and choose Soft Light, no transparency. This is the setting I had in my layer manager.

This is my end result, it kind of give and old fabric look that with time some of the colors did fade away.

Ok, let move on and see more ways to use our texture.

This time we are going to use the paint brushes in PhotoImpact to use our texture. This time I have a different color background than above, this one matches more the colors of my image.

Here is the setting I have use for the Air Brush, be sure you are in mode so your paint will be on it's own layer and not merge on the background. Next to Always you see a small image, click the down arrow to add your texture and or to choose the texture you want to use.

Now you are ready to paint on your canvas. Paint all over your canvas make sure you have cover all of it. Unless you only want to apply the texture to a particular area, then only do that part. Once done click out of mode.

This is what mine looks like when I click out of mode, as you can see, I have running ants around my paint because it is an object and not merge on the background. As you could also notice, the running ants seams to only show around darker shade of the color. This is because we do have some transparency here. Which makes it more interesting and we still could see some of the object under it.

Let's move on and paint an other texture in mode.

Same step as above, choose another texture, click on mode, same setting and brush, but change your value slightly,(value=color).

Start painting all over your canvas, once done click ok. This is what you will see, running ants again.

Here I have went maybe over board and applied a third texture over it, using same step as before.

Decided it was enough. Here I did want to imitate something old, and that looks used by the time with some golden texture type in it.

One more way to save your textures with transparencies. Follow me.

Here we are. We just did it when we did paint our texture. Let's do it over again.

This time open a blank canvas. Choose the paint brush you would like to use, (doesn't work with the drop water brush). Next choose your color, set your size, transparency if you want depending on the texture you are going to use, soft edge usually I leave at 50. Choose your texture if not in there you will have to add it. Then when ready, click on mode (Very Important) and start painting all over your canvas, make sure you have cover all of it. Once done, click out of mode. Hide your background and save as a ufo file.

Now you could click on your stamp, add you ufo file as a stamp and it is ready to be use as a stamps.

Ok for changing the color of your stamps, you may use the Hue and Saturation within the stamps window, or the one under the Photo, Color, or change with the color balance, or apply the fill, could use gradients or other color or two color, apply some color lighting filter to it, the possibilities are almost endless here. You have to play an experiment, there is no right and wrong, just different ways of doing things.

This one is one of the texture I did apply in my finish result.

This is another one I did used. Loll This one was from a photo of dry sand I took at the beach a long time ago. Thought it was interesting, but Hubby was wondering why I was taking a photo of dry sand, and I surely didn't ask him what he was thinking....hahahaha

You pretty well all know that our texture could be used as bump preset as well as some of them could be used as a reflection especially the one that has some different tone of shade and of course some of them could be use as mask.

There is lots of ways texture could be used and event more fun when you are making your own, either that you want to represent a wooden wall, a piece of fabric, paper,stucco wall etc. Main thing, explore in PI, experiment and you'll be surprised with what you could come up with.

Hope this have inspired you to explore and experiment, remember the white part of your texture won't show when you use it and the black part will be showing and the different of gray shade will show in different level of transparencies, keep this in mind when creating your texture. It has been a pleasure to share some ways with you. Don't forget to show us what you did at the PhotoImpact International. Don't hesitated to drop me an email if you need help or want to share your result.