Working with flower texture images in post - Photoshop Tutorial

- Now I'd like to work on something, in texture effects, that's completely different. what I've done is selected a flower that I photographed at a botanical garden, and let's go in and do some more advanced techniques. Okay, here we are, and it remembers the last thing we did and I'm going to go ahead and do 'reset', and then 'add adjustment' so we're starting from scratch. We're going to add a texture, and we're going to come up to 'my textures', and we're going to have the choice of selecting all these different options that I've imported, and right away, it's just so interesting what's happening here. Even the 'blend' mode normal's really cool. So I'm going to just select something that's already catching my eye, and now we're going to go through our blend modes. Just look how drastically different it is. You know, I kind of like normal, I'm going to go with normal here. I'm going to go ahead and open up a 'mask' with the purpose of brushing out the adjustment from some of the surrounding areas. Remember the strength of the brush, if you do a lower strength you can be more gradual in how you brush in. So we'll say that's okay for now. If I wanted to, I can get a little more fine tuning but, I want to move on and add another adjustment. Now this is something we didn't do in the previous movie, we just said okay and brought it back into Photoshop, but we're going to add another texture. And guess what, we can do as many as we want, so this again, the idea of stacking a texture on top of a texture is really cool. What's fascinated me about this is, when I process an image, I have a very clear idea of what I want and I just go through, and once in a while something will catch me off guard but for the most part, I'm very comfortable and with this, every time I hover over one of these textures, it's a revelation. I don't know what it's going to look like, and then all the sudden, it comes to life. It's a really fun and creative way to experiment with photography. Alright, I'm going with that one. Let's play with some blend modes. And again, you'll find blend modes that tend to work better than others, and you'll get the hang of that. But in the mean time, there's nothing wrong with going through and seeing what looks good. I'm going to go with 'dissolve'. The flower's almost disappearing, it's becoming this soft, Pastel outline, it's very cool. You don't know where you're going when you start, and you just get taken in these directions, that's what I love about it. Let's add one more adjustment. Now, as we add an adjustment, I could do another texture, but I also want to point out all of these options. This is such a full-fledge program that you can go into basic adjustment, lets do that just to demonstrate, and now all the sudden it feels like you're in Lightroom. You have brightness and shadows and highlights, and so in essence, you can stay within this program and do quite a bit. Now, you also can leave the program and do these where you're comfortable, so if you're more comfortable in Photoshop or Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, by all means. But, I do want you to know that this is here, and it's quite interesting at how built-up this program is. And we can keep adding adjustments, one that's kind of nice is 'diffusion', which can help soften the borders of the image, which is really nice. And we can mask that, so we can protect the flower and make the rest soft. very powerful adjustments, we can go texture after texture, such a complex yet once you start experimenting, it's a complex program in that there's so much you can do, but I don't think it's hard to do, and that's the beauty of it. Let's go ahead and bring it back into Photoshop. Okay, back in Photoshop, it's going to do a before and after. And we have a completely different image, it couldn't be any different. Let me just do little options, auto-curve, I just want to push a touch of contrast in here. Right in there, and then we're going to pull that opacity back. Yeah, just a touch. I like that, there we go. Okay that's the final image, I had no idea I was going to get here, I'm excited, I like it. This is a ton of fun. To wrap up, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the image I did of the tree, and the image I did of the flower, and I'm going to process both of them two more ways, and show you three different examples, and what's going to be exciting is, I don't know where they're going to go, but they're all going to be wildly different.