texture – Malcolm MacGregor Photography

I’ve had several people ask about my processing on the photos of the zoo animals. So I decided to create this tutorial to give you a little “behind-the-scenes” look at my processing.

This is what I started with. A fairly simple photo of an elephant taking a drink of water at the Nashville Zoo. This photo was taken with a Canon 7d with the 70-200 2.8L lens.

So the first thing I wanted to do was isolate the elephant from the background. There are many ways to do this and this tutorial does not really cover that. You can find many great tutorials on this by searching Youtube. I will say that I use a program call ReMask by Topaz. It’s really a great program and is very easy to use. Here it is with a black background:

Now, in order to really bring out the textures and wrinkles on this elephant I started messing with the curves tool. I created a curves adjustment layer and gave it a very basic s-curve adjustment to the entire image. This increases the contrast to the entire image

Now I wanted to begin to create a bit of a “strobist” effect. I wanted it to look like the elephant was lit by a single light source overhead. So I ctrl+shift+alt+e, which creates a new layer, and I grab the burn tool. I set it to “midtones” and a very low exposure. I begin to paint the edges with the burn tool. There difference is subtle, but you can really see it on the right hand side, the photo below is darker on the right than the photo above.

Next, because the burn tool darkens the highlights, I did another Curves adjustment layer to brighten the highlights. You can see it is a very simple curves tool where all I did was grab the box on the top right and drag it to the left.

Next was another curves adjustment layer, this one will be used to create a vignette. You can see below, I drag the curves line way down to the lower right. This will darken the entire image but I don’t want to apply this to the entire photo so I mask in the areas that I don’t want to change. Do this by painting with a black brush on the areas you don’t want the curves adjustment to effect. So in this case, the only areas I wanted darker with this layer was on the right hand side of the photo and a little on the trunk of the elephant. You can see how this really darkens the edge and keeps the viewers focus on the center of the image.

Now that I have the contrast pretty close to where I want it, I’ll convert the image to black and white. Again, there are many ways to do this. I use a photoshop plug-in called Topaz BW Effects. There are many options within this plug-in, play with the sliders until you get what you want.

Next, after another ctrl+shft+alt+e, I grab the Burn tool, set it to “shadows” and to a low exposure. I start to “paint” over the image. This will darken the shadows which really makes the textures and wrinkles come out.

After I get that the way I wanted, I needed one more curves adjustment layer to bring back any highlights I may have lost with the burn tool. By dragging the right side of the line up, you brighten the highlights.

And finally, I wanted to add some subtle tones to the image. So, it’s another curves adjustment layer. This time, drag the RGB drop down box to “Red” and drag the top portion of the line up. This will add a slight red hue to the highlights.

After that, while still in the same curves adjustment layer, drag the drop-down box to blue and make another slight adjustment.

Together, these add a nice, but very subtle, tone to the image.

And that’s it! Here is our final product.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you found this somewhat useful. I realize that this is not the ideal way to show a tutorial of this magnitude but I think you get the idea. Just keep trying and playing with curves etc until you get it how you want it. I actually worked on this image for a little more than an hour, slowly making subtle adjustments until I felt it was just right.

See more of my tutorials HERE including HDR tutorials. Let me know if you found this or any of my other tutorials useful by leaving me a comment!

Time for another tutorial, but this time something different. Instead of an HDR tutorial, how about a Texture tutorial? I’ll show you the textures I used and how I used them to turn this:

into this:

So here I am starting in photoshop:

I’ve already finished my normal adjustments for contrast, noise, sharpness, etc. I’ve covered those in each of my past tutorials, so check them out for those types questions. Just because this shot is not HDR does not change those basic adjustments.

So after getting to this point I decided that this shot just didn’t have enough excitement. I enjoy playing with textures and have posted photos here before with textures applied. So I decided to try to add a couple to see what I can come up with. The thing with textures (as with most editing in my opinion) is there is no right or wrong. It’s all subjective, what do you like?

There are soooooo many textures available online for free (I’ll show you some links at the end of this tutorial). Over the last few years I have collected a few that I really like and I tend to use the same couple of textures most of the time. This time however, I immediately thought about adding some “bokeh texture”. I looked through the textures I had downloaded and found this one:

This texture was downloaded for free from HERE. This site has many textures available.

After pulling it up in photoshop, I grabbed the MOVE tool and clicked and dragged the texture onto my bird photo. You’ll see that it automatically adds it as a separate layer. Now, the texture layer is smaller than my bird photo so I go to “EDIT” => “FREE TRANSFORM”

Now you can grab the corner of the texture and drag it out to the corner of the bird photo. Now all you’ll see is the texture and this is where the creativity really begins. The main 2 adjustments to remember are “Blend Mode” and “Opacity” – see below

Here you can see the texture completely covering the bird photo. The circles are circling the “Blend Mode”, “Opacity” and my Layers window (so you can see that the texture layer is the top layer). Clicking the drop down menu for “Blend Mode” I select “Overlay” and I leave the “Opacity” at 100%, and this is what happens:

Not bad! But, needs something else….

So I grab another texture:
This is one of my favorite textures to use. I downloaded it from flickr but I don’t believe it is still there. I’ve searched for the image and creator to credit but can’t come up with anything.

Using the same steps as above, drag the next texture onto the photo and adjust the Blend mode and/or Opacity:

Here you’ll see that I used “Multiply” blend mode (which darkens) and I backed off the opacity just a tad, down to 91%.

Looks good, let’s add another!
The next texture I tried is my other favorite. I often use it with the previous texture.
You can find and download this texture for free HERE

Again, drag it onto the photo, free transform and change the blend mode and or opacity:
This one put in Overlay and left at 100%.

Now I liked the texture it added but I didn’t like the color it added. I didn’t want the final image to be so yellow, so I add a hue/saturation layer and desaturate it:

Now, I didn’t want to desaturate the entire image, just the previous layer. So I right click on the hue/saturation layer and click on “Clipping Mask”:
This will make the hue/saturation layer ONLY effect the layer below it, in this case the “yellow” texture. Here is the final result of texture number 3:

With me so far?
Let’s add another
Grabbed this one:
This is another texture that I downloaded from flickr a while ago and cannot find it now to give credit.

Drug it over the photo and adjusted the blend mode:
This one I put in “Overlay” and brought the opacity way down.

Now at this point I was thinking it was a little dark and I wanted a little blue added to it. So, I grabbed this texture:
This one came in a set that you can download for free from HERE

This one brightened up the bird a bit too much so I added a mask and masked out the bird. Do this by adding a mask to the texture layer and paint with a black soft brush over the area that you don’t want the texture to show. The red shaded area shows where I painted.

And that’s it! Here is the final:

As I said, this could have gone in a million different directions. You can apply as many or as few textures as you like. The types of textures could also vary wildly. There are many to choose from all over the web, or you could try creating your own.

Just keep messing with them. Different opacities, different blend modes. Even changing the order of the textures makes a difference. You’ll add some that you won’t like, and end up deleting from the photo. Just keep playing with it until you’re happy with it!

http://shadowhousecreations.blogspot.com/search/label/Textures
http://www.thecoffeeshopblog.com/2010/12/coffeeshop-baking-with-mom-ethereal.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/borealnz
http://www.flickr.com/groups/textures4layers/
http://www.plaintextures.com/
http://www.texturelovers.com/
And on and on and on…..

Here are some of my other textured images: