From the course: Creating and Using Textures for Design

Photographing real-world surface textures - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Creating and Using Textures for Design

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Photographing real-world surface textures

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- I love texture exploring. Texture exploring is nothing more than getting out in the world, with the sole purpose of finding old, distressed surface textures you can then photograph, and eventually use in your creative work. I've gone texture exploring all around the world, from a local parking lot, to one of the Seven Wonders of the World in Petra, and many other places in between. That said, you don't have to travel around the world to find cool textures, they're everywhere. And unique surface textures can come from anywhere. It can come from a mundane source like a concrete retaining wall in a parking garage, or an old barn door. Whatever the source, the process of capturing is the same using photography. So join me as I go texture exploring in a unique location called Art City. When you shoot texture photographs, I always like using a wide-angle and macro, then I can get nice and close, and I can capture a larger surface area. I shoot textures with my iPhone too, but you don't get the same proportion. You can't get as large of an area. And this is a good example of why I use a wide-angle. This whole surface is just great, so I'm going to get different ratio of shots. One a little further away to capture the entire surface, and other ones where I kind of get close to it. When I shoot textures, it's always good to try to get as high contrast as you can. It's going to make using the texture later easier. It's going to make editing it and turning it into a useable texture resource file in Photoshop a lot easier, if you have a lot of contrast. If there isn't a lot of contrast, you could probably still use it, it's just more work to make it useable. This is a good example of a texture that is very useable almost immediately because it's high contrast. There's a good contrast between the background and this kind of rust texture. So I definitely captured that because this will be a good one to use. Just keep that in mind as you go texture exploring and you start photographing different surfaces. In this case, this is metal but it applies to any surface. The better the contrast, the better the end texture.

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