From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

Selective texture overlays - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

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Selective texture overlays

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- [Instructor] Blend modes are a quick and easy way to apply a texture on top of a photograph. So in order to do this, I will target the texture one layer and make it visible. And then I'll select the blend modes on the layers panel. We can see that as I move down through them, this first bunch of blend modes all make my image darker. Whereas the next set of blend modes are always going to lighten my image. It's this third set of blend modes that's going to add contrast, and they are the most popular blend modes when we're adding textures. I think the two most popular are probably going to be soft light and overlay. Now, if you want to use a keyboard shortcut to move through the blend modes, as long as you have the move tool selected or another tool that's not a painting tool, and therefore doesn't have a blend mode associated with it, you can use the shift plus key to move down through the blend modes, or you can use the shift minus to move back up through the blend modes. So in this case, I like the overlay blend mode, it's just a little bit too strong. So I'll change the opacity to 50%. Now with this second texture that I want to overlay, when I choose the soft light, I like the texture and the color that it's adding to the background, but I don't want that texture on the skull or on the pod. Now the first thing you might try to do is to mask the texture from those two areas. However, if I add a layer mask and I mask the skull in the pod, not only will I be masking the texture, I'll also be masking the color. So in order to get around that, well first, we can see this is a smart object already. In fact if I double click on it it'll open up in camera raw, and I can make adjustments because it's a raw file. If you're not working with a raw file, you'll want to convert the texture into a smart object. Once you've done that, we can go to the filter menu, and then select blur and then Gaussian blur. I'm going to add a large Gaussian blur, in this case 40 pixels, and that will blur away the texture in the whole image, but I still have that nice warm color. So now all I need to do is either select the background or select the skull and the pod, and hide the blur so that I get the texture in that background. In order to do this, I'll select the background and switch to the object selection tool. It's set to rectangle. So I'll click and drag over the skull first and then hold down the shift key in order to also select the pod. I'll use command zero in order to recenter that. And then on the smart filter mask, I'm going to fill this area with black using option delete on the Mac or alt delete on Windows to fill with my background color. And then I'll de-select it. Unfortunately, that's exactly the opposite of what I need. We can see the texture in the skull and the pod and not on the background, so all I need to do in the properties panel is click on invert. Now we see the texture and the color adjustment in the background, and only the color adjustment in the skull and the pod. Now I see there's a few areas that are actually missing. So I'll use command one in order to zoom in. Tap the B key to select my paintbrush. And then I just need to paint with black in the smart filter mask right here in this area, so that I am hiding the blur. I'll reposition my image using the space bar, and then just paint up here in this area. And I'll use the left bracket to get a little bit smaller of a brush. I can paint in there and right over here. Again, in order to see that texture in the areas that I want. I'll use command zero in order to zoom back out. And of course the advantage to using the smart object is not only do I have the mask, I can also go in and make changes to the amount of blur at any time. And because this is a raw file opened as a smart object in Photoshop, I can always go in by double clicking to edit the contents of the smart object, and I can change the temperature and the tint or the exposure or any other options. Clicking okay will apply that and rerender the information at the highest quality from that raw file. So the next time you want to add a texture to an image but you don't want the texture to be visible throughout the entire image, don't try to hide the texture with a layer mask. Instead, convert the layer to a smart object, add the Gaussian blur, and then just use the smart filter mask to reveal the blurred areas in the areas of the image that you want the texture.

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